[Solved]Dual booting Arch and Fedora

eric17 · 2012-05-12 13:50:36

i was hoping to partition like this:
/boot (same for both)
/root (arch)
/swap (same for both)
/root (fedora)
/home (same for both)

this doing is according to: bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=97121
as both are using grub2, i don't think having same /boot would coz any trouble
and about /home, having uid and gid 500 for both arch and fedora would not cause any trouble,eh?
how do i change uid and gid from 100 to 500 on first boot in arch?

thnz in advnc

Last edited by eric17 (2012-05-25 18:25:04)

WorMzy · 2012-05-12 15:27:07

Sharing /home between multiple distros is never a good idea imo. Set up a data partition and just mount -o bind various folders on it to ~/Documents, ~/Videos, etc. on both installations, that's my advice.

I can't see any problem with having the {u,g}id the same on both distros. Just tell useradd/adduser to use the ids you want. Might need to modify /etc/groups to change the id of the users group first though.

You only need one bootloader. so a dedicated /boot is fine.

fantab · 2012-05-12 16:35:41

No.. its not at all a good idea to have /home shared between two distros. It can cause conflicts with dot .files where your user configurations are stored. So take WorMzy's advice. An alternate to -o bind is just mount or automount /linux partiion on boot and set the default save path in your applications to /linux.

As far as UID is concerned just leave it as it is (by default it is 1000 on both distros) and will work out of the box.

In fact you don't even need /boot unless your computer used UEFI.

boswbr25 · 2012-05-12 17:16:53

@WorMzy and @fantab -

Isn't it okay to use the same /home partition as long as you have different user names?

I'm still kinda a newbie myself, so I guess I don't know for sure, but I have done it before and didn't seem to have any problems since each distro was only looking within the folder for the user name for that distro.

Does it have something to do with files saved in the "Lost + Found" folder? Or are there some other hidden files that go in the /home directory but not a specific user's folder?

I'm not doing it currently because I would never use the other distro anyways but I was just interested for future reference.

rnarch · 2012-05-13 16:03:11

Having different distros on different partitions have the advantage that if there is a problem in one, its partition can be formatted or reinstalled without affecting the other distros at all. One can keep all data in a third partition and mount it from whichever distro one uses.

ewaller · 2012-05-13 16:17:30

boswbr25 wrote:

@WorMzy and @fantab -
Isn't it okay to use the same /home partition as long as you have different user names?

I see no serious problems with that. One catch might be user and group ID conflicts between the two distributions. On fedora, a fictitious user 'joe' might have a UID of 1001. Arch may have a user 'sue' who is assigned 1001. When you are running Fedora, all of sue's files will appear to belong to joe, and vice-versa.

boswbr25 · 2012-05-14 01:51:01

Yeah, that is a good point. I hadn't really considered the file ownership implications. Although, for me, it doesn't necessarily matter right now because I am the only user of this computer but good to know if my gf ever decides she wants a separate user account.

eric17 · 2012-05-14 04:35:02

guys!..ran into a new one
now that, i have gpt table(want to try it for the first time), so bootloader doesn't install in MBR, so how to install it on /dev/sda1(no seperate for boot)?
there is no method to change the location from sda to sda1(as installer discourages it)
if it is so important to have it in MBR, then how do I force it while 'Install bootloader'?

eric17 · 2012-05-14 07:59:56

eric17 wrote:

guys!..ran into a new one
now that, i have gpt table(want to try it for the first time), so bootloader doesn't install in MBR, so how to install it on /dev/sda1(no seperate for boot)?
there is no method to change the location from sda to sda1(as installer discourages it)
if it is so important to have it in MBR, then how do I force it while 'Install bootloader'?

first i created bios_grub(1mb) on /sda1 through fedora installation(as without it, after installing arch, fedora was showing error that there is no boot storage device 1 or somethin like that)

then, through Gparted:
/root /sda2 fedora
/root /sda3 arch
/swap both
simple ext4 data partion (later i would create folders in it and bind them to each distro's home

then installed arch without bootloader in end....after that fedora and it installed grub 1.99 on /sda
now, both are booting fine

thnx to every one

Arch Linux

#1 2012-05-12 13:50:36

[Solved]Dual booting Arch and Fedora

#2 2012-05-12 15:27:07

Re: [Solved]Dual booting Arch and Fedora

#3 2012-05-12 16:35:41

Re: [Solved]Dual booting Arch and Fedora

#4 2012-05-12 17:16:53

Re: [Solved]Dual booting Arch and Fedora

#5 2012-05-13 16:03:11

Re: [Solved]Dual booting Arch and Fedora

#6 2012-05-13 16:17:30

Re: [Solved]Dual booting Arch and Fedora

#7 2012-05-14 01:51:01

Re: [Solved]Dual booting Arch and Fedora

#8 2012-05-14 04:35:02

Re: [Solved]Dual booting Arch and Fedora

#9 2012-05-14 07:59:56

Re: [Solved]Dual booting Arch and Fedora

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