[mdlug] REcommendations for Partiton with shared home directory?

[Carl T. Miller]

Hi Jim,

Sorry for the delay in responding.  Personally I think it's a
great idea to create many partitions for everyday usage
and for tinkering.

My thoughts go like this.  First, Windows is the one that
doesn't play well with others, and it likely comes preinstalled.
I'd suggest that you shrink the Windows partition which
will leave Windows undisturbed and provide free space.

Next create the swap space formatted as swap and the
/home partition formatted as vfat.

Then install the Linux distro you will use most often.
During the setup, create a /boot partition and use all
the remaining space to create a single physical volume.
Within the plysical volume, create a single volume group.
Withing the volume group, create a logical volume for
partition you want to create including the root partition
for the first distro.  Set the boot loader to install on
the hard drive (i.e. not the partition), and verify that
the Windows and the first distro are included.

You should then be able to boot into Windows or
Linux, and all the files in the home partition will be
available to both systems.

To add another Linux distro, just create and format
a new logical volume.  Do not use the /boot partition
on the hard drive (since distro 1 manages it) and do
use the /home and swap partitions.  Load the
installer into the partition (i.e. not to the disk).
Then boot into distro 1 and add the new boot entry.
Repeat this process for each additional distro.

You will now have a system that can be rebooted
into any of many distros, and they will all have
read/write access to the home partition.  You will
also have the ability to upgrade any OS without
losing your boot configuration.  And the best part,
you can slice and dice and delete and merge and
create and resize any of the logical partitions
without damage to of the filesystems.

Let us know if you have questions about this.  And
stay tuned for the next mdlug meeting where I
will give a presentation about using lvm.

c


On 2/13/24 03:27 PM, Robert James Fulner wrote:
> Recently I bought my first new laptop in over a decade, one of the reasons
> I fell in love with GNU/Linux was the ability to keep old hardware working
> well past its "expiration date."
>
> Anyway one of the things I like best about GNU/Linux is just the fun of
> playing with different distros. To this day Debian is still my favorite,
> but there are some I've never played with that I'd like to and I'd like to
> be able to have all my documents, media, etc. available regularly from any
> system I log into.
>
> The few searches I have done on sharing home directories have mostly been
> 10+ years old so I'm not sure how much they say is still acurate for today.
>
> They said the biggest concern with doing so is having the "hidden" config
> files for different versions of the same program may cause issues. I'm
> planning on using different DEs for each so if I use the defaults I would
> think I woudl avoid that for the most part, though I'm not so certainly
> about the lower level programs.
>
> So here's what I have to work with and what I'm thinking for a partition.
>
> 500GB Hd with 32GB RAM.
>
> Windows 11 (200 GB)
> Swap (2GB)
> HOME 275 GB
> Debian Testing (XFCE) 5GB
> PC Linux OS (Trinity) 5GB
> Gentoo (X11 w/JWM) 5GB
> Trisquel (GNOME) 5GB
> Flavor of the week 5GB (be able to keep a partition I can easily wipe and
> put whatever I feel like play with next.
>
> How does that look? Is 5GB enough for a full feature distro these days? Any
> recommendation of particular tool to do the partition and in which order to
> do so. In the past I've tried using the wizards built into
> Debian/Ubuntu/etc. and adding additional partitions later has seemed like a
> pain. Any particular files systems recommended? Ideally, I'd like the
> contents of my home directory to be able to be available via the Windows
> Partition too, but I'm guessing that would mean I'd need NTFS, I'm not sure
> how well the GNU/Linux distros would handle that, particularly for a 100%
> free distro like Trisquel.
>
> Any feedback is appreciated.
>
> Jim Fulner
> 22100 Armada Ridge Rd.,
> Armada, MI 48005-3204
> (P) 248-971-0259
> (M) 248-765-7458
> (H) 586-473-7007
>
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