On 11/28/2014 6:32 AM, Rusi Mody wrote:
I have a question along these lines:
Years ago when we used computers, many people used one machine --
centrally administered.
Nowadays one person uses many machines
1. Simply multiple hardware
2. Multiple OSes on the same h/w
3. Other more fancy (cloud) usage
Just staying with 2. for now and that too only Linux, its a good
idea to map the One-me <--> Many OSes to
One /home <--> Many 'slashes' (eg Debian on sda5, Debian 32 on
sda7 ubuntu on sda6 etc)
However there are some issues: if the software-versions in these
dont match up then its precisely these XDG files that tread on
each others'
toes across OSes.
XDG is not relevant to that.
Database formats change. Software that use databases change formatting
of information they store.
Configuration options/formats change.
Software developers usually only plan for the upgrading of these things.
If they do plan for downgrades
it would normally only be for rare special circumstances.
The Debian packaging system lets you downgrade packages, but there is a
disclaimer for the same reason.
Allowing older versions of software access to newer databases,
configuration files, etc... can get ugly.
Allowing older and newer the same increases the risk.
One solution that Ive been toying with is as follows:
1. Have one real My-home partition
2. Keep /home as part of the OS-file system, so that
each OS can mess around with its own 'XDG's'
I wonder if people have tried this (or something similar) and
any downsides
Depends on what you consider a down side.
Chrome and Firefox have solutions for bookmarks...
http://askubuntu.com/questions/41766/is-it-possible-to-enable-google-bookmarks-sync-in-chromium
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-set-up-firefox-sync
Assuming you don't just use webmail, and your email provider supports
it, there is imap for email.
http://www.pop2imap.com/
Pictures, music, etc... can all be kept on another partition, creating
symlinks in your home directory
within each installation in place of the real Documents, Pictures,
etc... that would normally be there.
As root you can do something like:
|groupadd sharedusers -g 2000
:to create a group in each installation:
|chown -R :sharedusers /location/of/shared/directory
:in one of the installations to change the group ownership of the
directory where you put your pictures,
documents, etc... note the ':' before the group name.
To change group permissions on the shared files/directories you can do
something like:
chmod -R g+rwX
:note capital X, execute/search only if the file is a directory or
already has execute permission for some user.
Later, Seeker
