Question for Lazyweb

[memnus]

Background: See previous post.

Question: Given that the new drive (single full-size partition, FAT32) already has data on it that I'd prefer not to copy over again, is there a way (in a fresh Fedora Core 5 install) to simply mount that drive as /home (bonus points for mounting as /home/byoung)? Or am I better off just symlinking to /hdb?

Bonus question: If some of the files I'd like accessibly from both boots (read: mp3s) currently have spaces in the file names, will Fedora care much?

I'm also plotting ways to have the two Firefox installs share a profile. That'd be badass.

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Comments

[vrable.livejournal.com]

You probably could do that...but some programs might not like it. (Not being able to adjust the permissions and ownership on files as expected, unable to create sockets and symlinks, etc.) I've not used FC5 myself, but you could add an appropriate line to /etc/fstab if you did want to give it a shot:

/dev/hdb  /home/byoung  vfat  uid=(your uid),gid=(your gid)  0 0

My personal guess is that it would cause more trouble than it's worth, so I'd advise against. You could mount in a subdirectory of /home/byoung with less trouble, I expect.

Spaces in filenames should be fine (Unix in principle allows just about anything—I've seen control characters in filenames before). Poorly-written shell scripts might have trouble, but otherwise applications should just work.

[inferno0069.livejournal.com]

From what I've read, sharing firefox profiles is a bad idea. Sometimes OS-specific binary things get stored there (e.g. plugins) and it won't be happy. Various ways to deal with this have been designed and might be able to be found via Google, but I don't remember anything more specific.

As vrable mentioned, putting the FAT32 drive as /home or /home/byoung will probably cause a number of complaints. It's probably best to have it mounted at /hdb and symlink to it from wherever you want it. I tend to have a few directories at the root of a volume and symlink to those: backups, music, tmp, whatever.

Spaces should be fine for Fedora, sometimes other characters can confuse things: accents from french / spanish or punctuation that's allowed on one OS and not the other.

[bjencks.livejournal.com]

As others have mentioned, sharing profiles is probably bad, putting home on fat is probably bad. Symlinking, or for even more transparency, mount --bind is the solution to that. For firefox, you might be able to point both profiles' bookmarks, cookie, and history files at the same shared place, without sharing the whole profile.