[TriLUG] Common home directory

[Tom Roche]

Scott G. Hall Sun, 26 Jul 2009 02:32:32 -0400
> I am trying to properly map across [several different OS,] GUI
> environments and window managers, different productivity software,
> and browser and email programs (though Firefox and Thunderbird
> predominate). I want updates done while logged in one environment to
> be reflected instantly when the user logs into another environment
> in the same local network. But I want to do this with a minimum of
> mounted directories and mapped drives per user

I did a very small version of this recently: interop for 2 OS
(cygwin/xp-sp3 and xubuntu-9.04) and ~2 apps (emacs and firefox) on 1
box. The good news is, non-default profile sharing just works for
firefox--with caveat below--so it should also work well for
thunderbird.

The main problems I've found (corrections appreciated--my linux chops
are still pretty weak) are (in decreasing order of significance)

0 My plan had been to just mount my cygwin /home/user as my ubuntu
  /home/user, and just use that. However all files and dirs in my
  ubuntu mount of my NTFS partitions always/immutably present as
  root:root with 777. Unfortunately some xubuntu apps wanted to have
  /home/user/.whatever s.t. .whatever is owned by user:group or had
  specific permissions (e.g. 600), and bitched/moaned/failed
  otherwise. In response I mounted my cygwin/xp /home/user in ubuntu
  like /home/user/xp_home, and wherever possible symlinked from its
  /home/user to /home/user/xp_home. That has worked well.

1 Update management schemes differ by OS. Notably, firefox manages its
  own updates in winxp (or user hits mainmenu>Help>Check for updates),
  but ubuntu manages updates for all apps (and under ubuntu Help>Check
  for updates does not work). Usually this won't be a problem, but I
  managed to stumble into the firefox 3.0.x -> 3.5.x transition, and

* (about this I'm certain) ubuntu won't be updating its main firefox
  package until the next version

* (about this I'm fairly certain) 3.5 runs significantly faster on
  winxp than does 3.0.x

* (about this I seem to recall) there are differences between the
  3.0.x and 3.5.x profiles that break interoperability

  Hence I installed firefox-3.5 (aka shiretoko) on xubuntu-9.0.4,
  which created a /home/user/.mozilla/firefox-3.5. I then copied the
  relevant stanza for the "real" non-default profile from one
  profile.ini to the other, and 3.5 runs from both OS w no problems.

  Similarly for emacs,

* the default xubuntu package is version=22, though an emacs-21 is
  also available

* cygwin defaults to 21, with a 23 also available.

* some important emacs packages (e.g. nXhtml/nxml, org-mode) or their
  dependencies are add-ons in earlier versions but are included with
  later versions.

  But I've been on emacs so long that my /home/user/.emacs.d/init.el
  already tests for version and changes load-path (et al) accordingly.

HTH, Tom Roche <Tom_Roche at pobox.com>