User Space Across Fedora & Ubuntu

I started to boot in different operating systems depending on what I was doing.

For example I have Bruce Eckel's First Steps in Flex book - but I've read about Adobe's Flex Builder for Linux just installing and working better in 32-but Linices, so I do that work in Ubuntu... but I review and do some code work when in Fedora.

Another example is web2py which I update from launchpad and do tests on (intentionally) in both.

Same goes for finances, Tomboy notes, web links, gnucash files, documents.... there are just many things I want to have one common copy for regardless of where I boot.

Ubuntu starts the default first userID at 1000. Fedora starts the first default userID at 500.

I created a second user on each (handy regardless, for backing up - I use rsync - the home space of my "main" account, since I don't want to be logged in when doing that).

On fedora, I changed the user and group id of my "main" user account in /etc/passwd and /etc/groups, then recursively changed the owner of the home space (now of an unknown user):

$ sudo chown -R myid:mygroup /home/myid

Now, key areas (Downloads, Documents, Pictures, Music, projects, workspace....) I symlinked to my Ubuntu space.

Recall that the common denominator is Ubuntu, since it uses ext3 filesystesm, while Fedora-11 now defaults to ext4 (for all except the /boot partition).

By the way, the internal disk seems quieter (an old EIDE drive) and noticeably faster on ext4 activities than ext3 (when those are on the same drive), so I like / prefer using ext4 for now.

I have not yet symlinked Tomboy - not sure if any of the data is dependent on 32-bit or 64-but aspects yet.