MX Linux Forum

With any muti-os sharing the same "home partition." You will likely be better off creating a small /home directory on your MX install, and any other distro you use. Symlink your data files to your MX /home directory, you can easily do so with Midnight Commander. Your configuration file for MX or any other distro will be in the /home directory for that install, and it would help you to avoid conflicts with your windows install. The fact that you have had success with other distro's is not your issue. There are some differences of opinion between Manjaro/Mint, Ubuntu/Mint and the many other distro's. They may have differences of opinion on security, even their init systems and software could be different. MX is a "just works" distro as it's parent distro, Debian Stable. These distro's work well with NTFS, windows does not play well with ext4, if at all. While I realize you "must have windows," you may learn windows is not friendly working with other operating systems. All of these various distro's have worked hard to make it easy to work with NTFS, which is not native to any of them. If only Microsoft would be as cooperative. You have been given plenty of good advice in this thread, perhaps you should try the advice instead of telling all of us it will not work. I work with NTFS files often.

paulfsams wrote: Sun Jun 02, 2019 5:37 pm With any muti-os sharing the same "home partition." You will likely be better off creating a small /home directory on your MX install, and any other distro you use. Symlink your data files to your MX /home directory, you can easily do so with Midnight Commander. Your configuration file for MX or any other distro will be in the /home directory for that install, and it would help you to avoid conflicts with your windows install. The fact that you have had success with other distro's is not your issue. There are some differences of opinion between Manjaro/Mint, Ubuntu/Mint and the many other distro's. They may have differences of opinion on security, even their init systems and software could be different. MX is a "just works" distro as it's parent distro, Debian Stable. These distro's work well with NTFS, windows does not play well with ext4, if at all. While I realize you "must have windows," you may learn windows is not friendly working with other operating systems. All of these various distro's have worked hard to make it easy to work with NTFS, which is not native to any of them. If only Microsoft would be as cooperative.

Thanks for a response with some actual meaning!

I have dual booted for years with no issue using this partition setup. But you are right, each distro does things differently.

And if I COULD live without Winblows I certainly would. Unfortuantley, one of my largest clients requires me to use a piece of software that will not work under Linux, even Wine. So do what I must there.

wptophat wrote: Sun Jun 02, 2019 5:49 pm

paulfsams wrote: Sun Jun 02, 2019 5:37 pm With any muti-os sharing the same "home partition." You will likely be better off creating a small /home directory on your MX install, and any other distro you use. Symlink your data files to your MX /home directory, you can easily do so with Midnight Commander. Your configuration file for MX or any other distro will be in the /home directory for that install, and it would help you to avoid conflicts with your windows install. The fact that you have had success with other distro's is not your issue. There are some differences of opinion between Manjaro/Mint, Ubuntu/Mint and the many other distro's. They may have differences of opinion on security, even their init systems and software could be different. MX is a "just works" distro as it's parent distro, Debian Stable. These distro's work well with NTFS, windows does not play well with ext4, if at all. While I realize you "must have windows," you may learn windows is not friendly working with other operating systems. All of these various distro's have worked hard to make it easy to work with NTFS, which is not native to any of them. If only Microsoft would be as cooperative.

Thanks for a response with some actual meaning!

I have dual booted for years with no issue using this partition setup. But you are right, each distro does things differently.

And if I COULD live without Winblows I certainly would. Unfortuantley, one of my largest clients requires me to use a piece of software that will not work under Linux, even Wine. So do what I must there.

I also use an ntfs partition for data storage. I keep my home folders for each linux installation (and windows for that matter) seperate (in the system partition for each system), and link in the data partition. Here's a screenshot of my setup.

I've found over the years that having the settings between linux distros seperate has helped me far more than it has hurt.

I also use an ntfs partition for data storage. I keep my home folders for each linux installation (and windows for that matter) seperate (in the system partition for each system), and link in the data partition. Here's a screenshot of my setup.

I've found over the years that having the settings between linux distros seperate has helped me far more than it has hurt.

Dolphin Oracle, I learned from many of my mistakes. It was Mepis Linux, long time ago, I discovered synaptic, and the user friendliness which has continued with MX Linux made setup so easy, then I was able to learn so much more. However, I still know just enough to be dangerous!

Sparky wrote: Sun Jun 02, 2019 5:28 pm Don 't feed the troll!
Being #1 has its costs, this is one of them.
Ignore him/her

He's (She's? I'll just use "he".) not trolling, he's just venting some frustrations. It's too bad that he didn't ask for help rather than ranting, which isn't helping him or anyone else. He did ask regarding a problem with pulseaudio not starting, which seemed to be related to the issue of using an ntfs home partition (a permissions problem) but never about the other issues.

For the life of me, I can't understand why the ntfs partition that has all of his data in it absolutely has to be his Linux /home partition. Why not mount it at /media/wptophat/data instead? Then it'll be there in Thunar, all of his stuff will be there, /home will be formatted as ext4 so all Linux permissions will work, and life is good.

Home directories contain a lot of system files too, such as configuration files and cache directories. They're in home because they can be different from user to user depending on how that user set up Linux. It's never a good idea to use a file system that isn't native to the OS for a system partition. It would be like trying to use a Linux ext4 partition for Windows' "Documents and Settings" folder. (See how even the name of the equivalent to /home in Windows is Documents and Settings? Those would be system files that are tailored for that individual user. I bet Windows would be broken too if it couldn't manage the ntfs permissions of files in that folder.)

dolphin_oracle wrote: Sun Jun 02, 2019 5:55 pm I also use an ntfs partition for data storage. I keep my home folders for each linux installation (and windows for that matter) seperate (in the system partition for each system), and link in the data partition. Here's a screenshot of my setup.

I've found over the years that having the settings between linux distros seperate has helped me far more than it has hurt.

That is a perfect solution to that part of my problem! Thanks,

Now if I can get Pulseaudio working properly I will be happy.

JayM wrote: Sun Jun 02, 2019 9:05 pm
For the life of me, I can't understand why the ntfs partition that has all of his data in it absolutely has to be his Linux /home partition. Why not mount it at /media/wptophat/data instead? Then it'll be there in Thunar, all of his stuff will be there, /home will be formatted as ext4 so all Linux permissions will work, and life is good.

FIrst, I am a he. LOL
And to answer your insinuated question honestly, when I first started dual booting some 15+ years ago, this is how I was taught to do this. It always worked, so I never had a reason to look at any other way of doing things. After almost 20 years in using Linux, this the first time I ever had this kind of problem.

And yes, I will admit I should have approached my frustrations better. My apologies for ranting.

wptophat wrote: Sun Jun 02, 2019 9:47 pm

JayM wrote: Sun Jun 02, 2019 9:05 pm
For the life of me, I can't understand why the ntfs partition that has all of his data in it absolutely has to be his Linux /home partition. Why not mount it at /media/wptophat/data instead? Then it'll be there in Thunar, all of his stuff will be there, /home will be formatted as ext4 so all Linux permissions will work, and life is good.

FIrst, I am a he. LOL
And to answer your insinuated question honestly, when I first started dual booting some 15+ years ago, this is how I was taught to do this. It always worked, so I never had a reason to look at any other way of doing things. After almost 20 years in using Linux, this the first time I ever had this kind of problem.

And yes, I will admit I should have approached my frustrations better. My apologies for ranting.

I don't think you were given very good advice 15 or 20 years ago about using a shared NTFS data partition as a Linux /home, not to mention that while that may have worked OK at the time, a lot has changed in Linux since then. Linux has gotten a lot more complex since the olden days of the early versions of Gnome and KDE. I think that was back before Linux used journaling file systems, for one thing. IIRC Linux originally used the minix file system but (I think) could even run on FAT32, though without the ability to control permissions, as well as on NTFS and a few other file systems. That was back when there was just a handfull of distros: RedHat, Slackware and Mandrake/Mandriva were the biggest as I recall.

If this is a recent MX installation and you haven't done a lot of tweaking and customizing yet, I think your best bet would be to reinstall MX, this time telling the installer that /home is inside of root. Then when you reboot into MX, open Thunar and locate your NTFS data partition under Devices over in the left-hand pane to access your data. I suspect that your pulse audio will work too. If you have done customisations that you prefer not to do over again you could try making a personal snapshot then installing it. But given the problems that you're having with your home directory right now, I'm not 100% confident that creating a snapshot then burning the resulting ISO to a USB or DVD would even work.

Or, instead of reinstalling you could try logging in as root, unmounting the NTFS drive or partition, creating /home in root if it's not already there, editing fstab to tell MX to use that as its /home, creating a subdirectory inside of home for your user account, copying everything from /etc/skel to that directory including all hidden files and directories, changing ownership and group ownership of it to your unprivileged user, then setting the proper permissions so you can access everything when you log in as the user. If you're able to do that, later on you can edit fstab (or use System/Disk Manager for a GUI tool) to tell MX to auto-mount the NTFS partition when it boots, then delete your Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Music. etc. directories inside of your home directory and create symlinks to the ones on the NTFS drive, if you don't like the idea of having to remember that you have to click on the NTFS drive in Thunar to get to your data (and after that many years of your stuff being in home doing it differently would take some getting used to, I'm sure.)

I think the easiest way would be to reinstall though, then you can still do the auto-mount and symlinks thing afterward. If you let the installer set up the user account you'll be sure that all files and permissions needed by MX to let you log in and let everything work will be in place, where if you do it manually as root something might go wrong.

If the NTFS partition is on a different hard disk (you didn't post your Quick System Info in either this thread or your Pulse Audio thread so I can't tell), if I was you I would physically disconnect the cables from that drive (with the computer powered off and the power cord unplugged) prior to reinstalling MX just to be on the safe side, to prevent any possibility of MX still trying to use it as /home and reformatting it as ext4. I'm certain that MX wouldn't do this, but I always like to take the extra step to be safe, just in case.

Upsss. So many to read. My recommendations to @wptophat.

I am not going in detail or to discus your experience and history. Actually I have 3 laptops and I am a distro hoper.Only in the week end I have tried maybe 5 or 6 different linux (slackaware based or respins of MX based in Debian or Devuan), but this is not the clue( still back to MX Linux, ARCH and Sparky Linux).I have also Windows in all laptops that I own. Finally I removed Windows from one of them.Not worthy to have Windows anymore. How I switch or have files for/from Windows and Linux ? Windows is Windows and Linux is Linux (separately).I have another partition as NFTS format.It is my Storage partition.That's it. Windows and Linux share this partition. Would be better to be puritan. Ext4 is much secure than NFTS (with all of shitty things around) Also, if you have all ext4 partition in your Linux machine, you can use utilities/programs to read ext4 partition from Windows. Disk Genius(from Windows) is one of them. It do not need to have special services to read ext4. It loads by demand. Also another program is : ExtFS for Windows | Paragon Software (the best that I found), but also other. This is my experience.