Sharing files between distros

[Bill Campbell]

On Sat, Jun 04, 2005, Collins Richey wrote:
>I like to experiment with lots of distros, but I've grown tired of
>copying data between distros. Does anyone have a good (ie relatively
>trouble-free) scheme they would like to share? I'm principally looking
>at the following things. Would shared partitions with symlinks in the
>appropriate places be a good idea?
>
>1) home directory. Obviously quite sharable if the ownership and
>permissions are correct (uid's gid's match). But what about the
>problem of varying kde, gnome, xfce, etc, etc that keep potentially
>incompatible hidden stuff in the home directory?

Set up a basic home directory with subdirectories for each distribution
automounting these into your real home directory.  You don't need to use an
automounter, just create a ``/homes'' partition which has something like
/homes/collins, /homes/collins/suse93, etc. in it, then make the
appropriate symlinks, ``ln -s /homes/collins/suse93 /home/collins'',
perhaps copying over the default directory setup from the distro's user
creation.  One can also create a /home/collins/data directory symlinked
to /homes/collins to make it easy to reference shared data.

I started doing something like this when we were building a lot of diskless
bootable Linux work stations, largely to allow home directories that had
monitor-specific configurations.

>2) var (principally /var/lib for my MySQL/PostgreSQL databases and
>/var/www[/??? ] (usage varies considerably) for the apache root
>document directory. I'm sure that some distros are relatively
>incompatible in ownership and permissions for some of the stuff in
>/var.

We use the OpenPKG portable package management system for this
sort of thing, and it's easy to handle things like this.

Bill
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