Is it possible to manipulate a Linux distro's implementation of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard?

Question

On my PC I tend to run two or three distributions at once. Naturally, each one needs a separate /home directory to avoid conflicts in user settings between them. However...

I want every user to have easy access to their documents from any distro running. For instance, I want "/home/user1/Documents" in openSUSE to point to the same place as "/home/user1/Documents" in Gentoo, while neither of these should be the same directory as "/home/user2/Documents". Naturally, "/home/user1" in openSUSE must be a different directory from "/home/user1" in Gentoo.

Ideally I want a partition which houses the Documents directories. It should retain the permissions of each user, their own files accessible only through their own home/Documents directory. So, for instance...

/dev/hda3 as /home under openSUSE
/dev/sda3 as /home under Gentoo
/dev/hda4 as /home/*/Documents under both openSUSE and Gentoo

Is this possible? Without symlinks? Alternatively, would it be possible to define a new directory set similar to /home/* - something like /documents/* - which could have its own partition as one expects for /home/*

I hope all this makes sense!

Answer 1

You could make another partition for your shared documents and mount that as you said in the last paragraph (under /documents/* I mean) -- although that means the documents won't show up under /home/userX/documents; however, I am curious why you don't want to use symlinks for this, as this is a perfect use for them.



EDIT:

Symlinks are quite useful and they're probably being used in places you don't really expect already. For example, /dev/cdrom, /dev/modem and /dev/mouse are usually symlinks.

Answer 2

If I understand your goal correctly: you cannot have the SAME permission for different users. THe user in gentoo is not considered the same user that you have in suse, even though they are both yourself. THis is the way that linux protects the files of on user from another user.

You could access the various users files by su ing to root or su other user and give the proper password.

I don't believe symlinks work across partition boundaries. See man ln.

Good luck

Answer 3

Not easily. Symlinks were the best solution to come to my mind...so, why not user them?