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Re: [LUG] Upgrade from to Ubuntu 9.04

 

Michael Mortimore wrote:
On Wed, 16 Sep 2009 21:15:23 +0100, james kilty <james@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Any reason you don't want to use the same user for all distros?
I thought the hidden files for the different programmes might have
different values in each distro for whatever is stored there so it is
best practice.
The way I see it is that the distro should have very little to do with the contents of your home directory. all the distro config should be in etc and user specific settings should be in home. I personally just use the same home partition and user accounts and haven't ever noticed any problems, neither from different distros nor different versions of the same distro. Maybe if you tried something like gobolinux it might not be so straight forward but I'm pretty sure most will be ok.

I was wondering if there was anything I should be careful about in the
setting up process - format new partition, use old swap space,
presumably I can just add the new user without it formatting the
existing /home.
I would have a root partition per distro and share common /home, swap and /usr/local partitions between them all.

If you use suspend to disk you'll need separate swap partitions.

If you add a user under distro a and not distro b, then when you boot distro b you won't be able to log in as that user but you would be able to see the user directory in /home. I think the first user you add will get uid 1000 and subsequent users are numbered 1001, 1002 etc (this might depend on the distro? not really looked into it), so user 1 in distro a and user 1> in distro b could have different names but the same uid and therefore share ownership of the files. If both accounts are yours it doesn't really matter, but if they are owned by different people, that would be a security hole.

I gather Fedora & CentOS uses different UID and GID's to Debian/Ubuntu.

Rob


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