Dual booting and sharing partition

mustafaupk · 2011-11-28 21:07:57

Hi,
I am planning on installing Xubuntu and Arch on my laptop during the christmas break and have been reading around about how to best do this. I want to share the /home directory between these two installs to minimize duplicating files. I would like to know if there are any other folders that can be shared between two systems like Xubuntu and Arch.
Secondly, I would like to know if both Xubuntu and Arch can be installed on logical partitions within the same extended partitions.

Montague · 2011-11-29 21:12:39

Last edited by Montague (2015-07-28 02:36:35)

MisterAnderson · 2011-12-01 19:54:39

I don't anymore (rarely dual boot linux with linux these days) but if you're sharing a /home between two OS's I used to make the username on each system name-os (greg-arch and greg-ubuntu for my examples).

mustafaupk · 2011-12-02 15:56:21

Thank you. Will give it a shot soon.

ferda · 2011-12-04 00:33:33

It’s not really a solution to your problem at this point, but when data deduplication is introduced to btrfs (zfs in FreeBSD 9 has it), you could probably install the systems into different subvolumes and avoid duplicate files (I’m not an expert on btrfs though).

Sharing /boot is theoretically possible (if kernel and initrd have different names in the used distros) but a) doesn’t save any space and b) confuses grub2 (if you use it), it will p.e. generate entries which use the arch kernel and the xubuntu initrd.
But it should work fine if you use a bootloader with a manually created configuration file like syslinux or grub.

Arch Linux

#1 2011-11-28 21:07:57

Dual booting and sharing partition

#2 2011-11-29 21:12:39

Re: Dual booting and sharing partition

#3 2011-12-01 19:54:39

Re: Dual booting and sharing partition

#4 2011-12-02 15:56:21

Re: Dual booting and sharing partition

#5 2011-12-04 00:33:33

Re: Dual booting and sharing partition

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