not backup but using gnucash in two different distros

[Keith A. Milner]

On Saturday 29 November 2008 12:57:34 Donald Allen wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 4:48 AM, Manfred Usselmann <
>
> usselmann.m at icg-online.de> wrote:
> > Harold <hh6199 at yahoo.com> schrieb am Fri, 28 Nov 2008 12:55:46 -0800

> I'm going to chime in here. You suggest above "keeping it simple" and then
> follow it with several paragraphs involving valid, but advanced, stuff such
> as added partitions, an eSATA drive, etc. We are trying to advise a person
> who has described himself as "inexperienced with Linux". I think your
> original idea about simplicity was correct. I would suggest to Harold that
> he's attempting to mix inexperience with complexity, not a good
> combination. My advice is to begin with one computer, one distribution, one
> version of gnucash, gnucash data in his home directory and learn how to use
> that. 

If he's still learning to use Linux and Gnucash then I am tempted to agree.

However, there's valid reasons for having multiple distros on single machine. 
For instance, I have two distros on my laptop: 1 boots into Mandriva 2008 for 
work stuff, and the other boots into Ubuntu Studio for messing around with 
music. This is largely because Studio has a realtime kernel which is pretty 
essential for the music side of things, but I can imagine people having 
separate distros for other reaons.

However, I feel that this is a semi-advanced setup in anyone's book. Anyone 
who has gone through the process of doing this setup will have already had to 
have gone through some relatively intermediate-level steps. Optimising such a 
setup is absolutely possible but to expect to do this without resorting to 
some command-line work (if only at the setup stage) is unrealistic.

Highlights I have mine set up may be useful for others doing somthing similar:

* Both distros have their own root partition but share the /home partition.

* Each distro has a user "keith" configured on it. I made sure both have the 
same UID/GID when I set them up.

* On Mandriva, the user "keith" has a home dir "/home/keith". On ubuntu the 
user "keith" has the home dir "/home/keith-studio".

Each distro has it's own user environment, but as /home is shared and the 
UID/GIDs are the same, user "keith" can access both home dirs from either 
distro.

I don't use this for Gnucash, but if I did I would simply navigate to the home 
dir which had the gnucash files and open them there.

Cheers,

-- 
Keith A. Milner