[mdlug] FWD: MDUG meeting 4-14

[Aaron Kulkis]

Mathew Enders wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-04-09 at 13:46 -0400, Garry Stahl wrote:
>> Partion 1 swap.
>> Partitions 2-12 distros
>> Partition 12, user home, shared by all distros.
>>
>> Are their any problems here I don't know about?
>>
> Gary the problem with sharing the same home directory with each distro
> would be incompatable config files.  Unless you are going to a diffrent
> user for each distro inside home e.g. /home/userubuntu, /home/usersuse
> et al.  Then the question arises how would the other distro's treat
> those users homes you would have to make sure none had the same uid.
> 

There are indeed ways around this.. at GM, we made user's
home directories mountable and usable on FOUR different
unix vendors' machines ... HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris and AIX.

However, that said, it can be quite involved, and merely
using "uname" (which responds with a string like "HP-UX"
or "UNIX System V" or "4.4 BSD UNIX" or "linux" doesn't
work on multiple linux installations)  doesn't work...
so other tests have to be made instead, and those are
probably NOT guaranteed to be 100% forward compatable
with future releases of any distribution.