Re: Advice for installing test2 if you are going to be saving files

[Russell Coker <russell coker com au>]

On Sun, 4 Apr 2004 04:52, Brian Bober <netdemonz yahoo com> wrote:
> I wonder if, using this multi-partition scheme, you could just nix the "/"
> partition and leave the other ones intact if reinstalling fedora core2
> test2. Has anyone tried this or does anyone know whether it would work? I
> might get a chance to try it if I start getting kernel panics again. :-)

Using the same /home with multiple versions of Linux (or even different 
distributions) is not uncommon and will generally work well.  Sharing /home 
for SE Linux and non-SE Linux machines is slightly more tricky (IE if you 
create files when not running SE Linux then they will not have labels next 
time you use SE Linux - using the context= mount option to label them as 
nfs_t might be an easy hack to solve this).

Sharing /home for multiple SE Linux installations should work well as long as 
they have the same policy.  If one installation of SE Linux has a user entry 
for account netdemonz then any files you create will have the context 
netdemonz:object_r:user_home_t (or something similar).  If you then boot a 
copy of SE Linux without a user entry for netdemonz then those files will be 
unlabeled (and not accessible to non admin users).

As for /var, there are files in /var/lib and /var/cache which may have 
different formats if you have different versions of the applications that use 
them.

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