Arch Linux

japtar10101

Member

Registered: 2009-08-08

Posts: 57

Dual booting Arch with Fedora

Weird question: I want to dual boot Fedora and Arch on my laptop so that they'd share the same home partition.  What would be the best partition configuration to achieve this, and how should I setup the users in both distros?  Note that I was planning to install GNOME for Fedora, and either Awesome, Xmonad, Wmii, or the like on Arch.

I was briefly thinking of partitioning my hard drive this way:

/boot (fedora)
/boot (arch)
/ (fedora)
/ (arch)
swap (both)
/home (both)

I suspect Fedora and Arch had their own way of installing the kernel, so I figured I should make separate boot partitions for each one.

demian

Member

From: Frankfurt, Germany

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 709

Re: Dual booting Arch with Fedora

You should either use one boot partition for both distributions or none at all. Both make sense and are safe choices.

If i wanted to use encryption, was planning on installing many distributions or simply felt like i needed the flexibility i'd use a ~200 - 300 MB big boot partition. Depending on the amount of RAM available I'd choose a swap partition of not more than 768 MB (except I'd want to use hibernation).

If i were to partition again i'd probably create my partition table like this:
/boot ext2
swap swap
/(arch) ext4
/(fedora) ext4
/home ext4

As for the user configuration, you should choose different usernames.

Last edited by demian (2010-05-14 19:12:50)

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no place like /home
github

japtar10101

Member

Registered: 2009-08-08

Posts: 57

Re: Dual booting Arch with Fedora

As for the user configuration, you should choose different usernames.

I understand that I'll face configuration errors when using the same username, but are there actually any serious risks on this?  I'd like the 2 distros to share the same files.

Also, what about the root user?

demian

Member

From: Frankfurt, Germany

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 709

Re: Dual booting Arch with Fedora

root has it's home in /root. As you shouldn't have config files as root anyway you shouldn't worry about that user.

As for the sharing of the same user directory in /home i don't see any serious risks. There can be issues with configuration files of different versions of applications. Also certain applications like gconf might not like sharing their registry-like files at all but since you're planning on using different DE/WMs i'm sure you'll be fine.

With libetc you could reduce the risk of conlicting configuration files by using more or less two sets of configuration files (one in ~ and one in ~/.config). I haven't used it yet so this is only an idea and since you want to explicitly share the configuration files it's probably not for you.

Last edited by demian (2010-05-14 21:15:53)

---

no place like /home
github