I can’t seem to find a comprehensive or complete guide on how to do it, but I know it’s possible. I have a separate /home partition and I’d like to use that for both distros.
What I know so far is that I have to create at new partition for SuSE (but i don’t know how big it needs to be). And if I’m not mistaken, I need to reinstall my programs in SuSE (like VLC and such), but my personal settings are stored in /home and will apply to both distros. Correct?
I actually just did this on my machine last night. It’s much easier than it seems.
Yes, use your /home for both distros, as well as your swap space. You’ll need a new boot partition for Suse. If you’re using it just for applications, 10GB is plenty.
Is that what you’re asking?
I can’t seem to find a comprehensive or complete guide on how to do it, but I know it’s possible. I have a separate /home partition and I’d like to use that for both distros.
What I know so far is that I have to create at new partition for SuSE (but i don’t know how big it needs to be). And if I’m not mistaken, I need to reinstall my programs in SuSE (like VLC and such), but my personal settings are stored in /home and will apply to both distros. Correct?
Thanks.
I guess I should make backups of important files just in case, before I try this. If I understand things correctly, I need to install a “grub” to be able to switch between distros. Or does SuSE install one automatically?
Suse will install one automatically. Actually, it recognizes all of your OSes pretty nicely.
You have ubuntu installed already? If so, I would load up the live cd and use gparted to setup your Suse partition.
Yeah, I’m running Ibex. Pretty satisfied with how it works, but it has a tendency to hang for no apparent reason. So I figured I’d try SuSE as well. The most important thing for me is that my /home stays safe, I have a billion settings for Firefox and such that I hope I won’t have to set up through again. I’ve got OpenSuSE 11.1 on a Live CD.
Where do you plan on putting Suse? Do you plan to resize your Ubuntu or home partition? If you resize your home partition to make space for Suse, I would highly recommend backing up all of your /home. If you’re just resizing your Ubuntu partition, I don’t think it’s necessary, however backing up your important files is never a waste of time.
Like I said, I JUST did this last night. Exact situation. I booted into the Ubuntu live cd, and loaded gparted. I setup the drive exactly how I wanted it, with enough space for various linux distributions. I set aside a /home and swap partition that I could share for all the linux distros at the end of the drive.
You can’t go wrong with gparted, just make sure and backup everything in /home before you do anything.
Hey, I’ve been away on vacation so I haven’t gotten around to do this yet. I was peeking around in my /home folder. It’s too big to back it all up on one DVD disc, but if I leave the music files it’ll be OK (I have it in CD anyway). Problem is, when I drag and drop the /home folder onto my DVD folder, I’m told that I don’t have permission to copy “lost+found”. I guess I don’t need to back that folder up anyway.
So I check all the folders, including hidden ones (I guess that’s where my Firefox settings etc are), and drag and drop them onto the DVD disc, but I get the same error message, can’t move “lost+found”.
Maybe there’s a program somewhere to make backups easier, I’ll have a google around.
I gave up making a fancy backup of /home altogether, I just copied the most important files like private photos and such.
Anyway, I’m trying to install a second distro (starting with CrunchBang Linux which is based on Ubuntu) (if it works, I’ll install OpenSUSE too, later).
It appears my / partition is about 14 GB and /home is 128 GB (with 37 GB used). I guess the next step is to shrink /home to make room for the new distro. Right?
If you’re sure you want to share settings, you can do it that way, but it will certainly lead to complications if you need different settings per distro.
I would recommend having a single /home partition belonging to one distro, then the other distros having homes on their root partitions, and symlinking the constituent data directories (like Documents, Photos, etc) to the ones on the /home partition.
That way all distros can share data, but you don’t have to worry about settings. Individual settings files can be copied or symlinked when necessary. I can elaborate on this process if you wish me to, but consider this a warning: I’m no expert, but I think what you’re trying to do may later lead to difficulties.
Yeah, I just saw a warning against sharing /home, on some other forum. I don’t really know anything about symlinks…
Maybe I should make a dedicated partition, like /data or /files, to store all my stuff on.
Hello funky_uncle, I just got down reformting my harddrive and setting up partitions for my triple-boot system. I had long conversations with fellow penguin user about the correct(maybe prefect way) of setting up a partition table for my harddrive. With my partition table, I needed room for vista, opensuse, and ubuntu (in order). This is how I set it up:
Primary 1 = Vista (honestly the biggest waste of space)
Primary 2 = OpenSUSE mount point /
Primary 3 = Ubunut mount point / (Keeping this around for games, don’t hear that often haha)
Primary 4 = Extended Partition
~~~~Partition 2 = Suse's /home
~~~~Partition 3 = Ubuntu's Swap
~~~~Partition 4 = Ubuntu's /home
I set this all up with SUSE's partition editor. It was quite easy. Please take the advince from Confuseling and I. Give a different /home partition to both distros. So you don't have problems down the way. A lot of things get stored in your home directory. Make sure you back up everything, including the hidden directories in your /home before installing your extra's OSs. I did a backup of my old /home directory before wiping everything and installing all the new OSs. I still ended up forgetting to backup my custom xorg.confs :-/ Oh well, it won't take me long to remake them again. Just double check everything.
Good LuckThere are several things you can do. The simplest by far is to have separate /homes, as suggested by ocha. Or you could share a /home partition, and use different usernames for each distro. The first is OK if you don’t have too many distros. The second works, but is inelegant.
The way I did it is this (and I’m not claiming it’s especially elegant ;))
Create ‘Primary distro’ - whichever one you intend to keep longest. Give it a separate home partition.
Create other distros, and create the users in the same order than you created them in the primary distro. They should hopefully now have the same UIDs - this can be fixed later if they don’t. Each distro can have a separate home partition if you don’t mind your partition table looking like a phone book. 
(also note that you can only have four primary partitions - any more and you must use extended partitions). Personally, I didn’t bother, and just let them place /home on the root partition. My secondary distros are mostly for playing with, and if I have to reinstall, it doesn’t take too much effort to recreate settings. All distros share swap.
Check all UIDs are consistent between distros. Run ‘id’ for each user. If any are different, change them with ‘usermod -u [UID] [username]’.
In each secondary distro, make a directory in /mnt called data. Add a line to /etc/fstab to mount the primary distro’s home partition here. Mine looks like this;
/dev/sdb2 /mnt/data ext3 defaults,noatime 1 1
sdb2 is my primary distro’s home. The other settings depend on the filesystem and how you want it mounted - search for fstab docs or ask if you’re unsure (I’m not an expert, but someone will be able to explain).
cd ~
rmdir Documents
ln -s /mnt/data/[username]/Documents Documents
Repeat for all directories and all users. Only real problem I’ve run into is if you delete something through one of the symlinks it won’t put it into trash, but just give you a warning box then delete it permanently. Works for me. 
Forgot to mention, obviously then you can symlink whatever program configuration directories you want linked, like .mozilla. I haven’t got as far as trying this, so can’t guarantee it’ll work; back up anything first, and have a google around - but I can’t see any reason in principle that it won’t be possible.
(sorry to reply to myself - must learn to think, then type :()
If you do symlink configuration folders, you may run into disaster with version mismatches. I think symlinking specific files - like bookmarks, or email databases, is probably relatively safe, because the structure of these doesn’t change all that often. But it might go pear-shaped, and you definitely should back things up if you intend to try this.
I have one newbie question too.
My laptop dual boot Vista + Ubuntu 8.04 and i want to install openSUSE too. My disk look like that :
Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xb165eda1
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 35106 281980896 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 35107 37744 21189735 5 Extended
/dev/sda3 37745 38913 9381888 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda5 35107 37629 20265966 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 37630 37744 923706 82 Linux swap / Solaris
I have plenty space for another distro 
and i want to install openSUSE too.
Ok, which partition do you intend to shrink / replace?
And how are you presently controlling the boot?
Hi,
My Vista & Ubuntu are on drive :C
I suppose i will shrink drive :C with the vista manager ore Gparted (i never us it) and will give 20GB for openSUSE (is that enought?) For boot manager i want to keep the GRUB, i read in internet most of the crashes are because opensuse us to replace the grub boot loader with lilo.
Is it possible for swap to us the ubuntu swap ore i need create new one:
/dev/sda6 37630 37744 923706 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Thank you for the reply : )
Swap can be shared between distros. You’re a little confused about designation of partitions - Windows thinks of its first partition as C, but in linux terms it’s sda1. I’d read this.
You can shrink partitions, but remember it’s dangerous. I’ve never done it, but from what I understand you MUST defrag a Windows partition several times first, and you should do Windows partitions using Windows tools - gparted can be a bit funny with Vista. Back up anything important first - there’s always a risk of data loss.
If I were you, when I installed, I would put the SUSE bootloader on the SUSE root partition, not on the MBR. You already have a functional grub on the MBR, and it will be straightforward to put a chainloader stanza in it to load SUSE. This way you do minimal monkeying with what works already - and you leave yourself the option of upgrading Ubuntu’s bootloader to one that can handle EXT4 if you upgrade Ubuntu. Still, I’m no expert, so read around and have a think about what you want to do first. Good luck.
Sorry - forgot to say. 20GB is fine for an experimental install, although obviously you won’t keep your film library on it.
And SUSE won’t try to install Lilo (although I think it’s an option if you ask it to).