[wplug] Redhat, Fedora, and home folders...

[Bill Moran]

John Harrold <jmh17 at pitt.edu> wrote:

> Sometime in August techmike assaulted the keyboard and produced:
> 
> | Has anyone run a mixture of Fedora and Redhat machines using a NFS mount
> | for home folders..
> | 
> | I have a small workgroup of redhat pc's that logon to an NIS domain, and
> | use NFS for home folders..  Just wondering if I throw a Fedora box in the
> | mix I'm going to corrupt home folders just like windows roaming profiles
> | do..
> 
> We're doing this here. Right now we have a Debian box which is running NIS,
> NFS, and Samba with our users home directories located on this server (via
> autofs maps being pushed by the server). We have several computers running
> Redhat 9, 7.3, and Fedora Core 2. So a user can login to any of these
> machines and access their home directory. I'm not sure what you mean by
> corrupt home folders. The only interpretation I can think of right off hand
> is this situation: 
> 
> I login to the Fedora Core 2 box running KDE 3.2.3. Then I try to login to
> the Redhat 9 machine with KDE
> 3.1. For some reason an incompatibly exists between KDE versions and KDE on
> the Redhat 9 box barfs as a result.
> 
> This is possible, but I don't think I would describe this as a corruption.

I've noticed that KDE and Gnome try to be good about keeping their configs
safe.  Gnome will make new . directory for each version to keep configs
seperate, for example.  Also, the XML format of their text configs makes
it very easy for an older version to ignore config options that it doesn't
understand.

Worste case scenerio, you'll have to delete the KDE _config_ and recreate
all the desktop settings on next login.  I've never heard/seen this happen,
though.  I think the KDE/Gnome folks are a lot better about maintaining
compatibility than Microsoft.  Microsoft enforces incompatibility.  They
want you to be required to upgrade _everyone_ to the newest version of
Windows.  The KDE and Gnome teams seem more reasonable in their setup.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com