I own a couple of laptops running 10.04. Inevitably, one of them has become
something of a de facto "desktop," which mostly stays at home connected to a
larger screen as well as a better keyboard and mouse, while the other I use in
the traditional role as a travelling companion.

I'm getting tired of trying to keep them synchronized all the time. What I'd
like to try is to put my home directory on a usb drive.

The downside is that I would always have to have that drive plugged in on boot
to either laptop. The upside is that I would always be assured I am working
with an up-to-date home directory, regardless of the computer I am using, at
all times. I could also avoid constantly waiting for rsync to work.

I tried to replace /home/foo with a symlink to /foo on my usb drive, which
didn't work. It looks to me as if certain items necessary to loading a
desktop aren't present when GNOME needs them (probably before the auto mount
utility mounts the drive).

My next attempt will be to put the usb drive directly into /etc/fstab. I have
read the blkid man page to find out the drive's UUID. Can anyone find any
pitfalls to this approach? Will the automount utility (it used to be HAL, but
now it might be something else) try to mount it again?

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I'm not sure if this is what you need/want, but have you tried Dropbox?* You can install it on multiple computers, and then it will keep up to 2GB of files synced between them and also on their servers.* If you want, I'll send you a referral link, and you can get an extra 250MB


On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 3:59 PM, Tim Hanson <tjhanson@yahoo.com> wrote:

I own a couple of laptops running 10.04. *Inevitably, one of them has become

something of a de facto "desktop," which mostly stays at home connected to a

larger screen as well as a better keyboard and mouse, while the other I use in

the traditional role as a travelling companion.



I'm getting tired of trying to keep them synchronized all the time. *What I'd

like to try is to put my home directory on a usb drive.



The downside is that I would always have to have that drive plugged in on boot

to either laptop. *The upside is that I would always be assured I am working

with an up-to-date home directory, regardless of the computer I am using, at

all times. *I could also avoid constantly waiting for rsync to work.



I tried to replace /home/foo with a symlink to /foo on my usb drive, which

didn't work. *It looks to me as if certain items necessary to loading a

desktop aren't present when GNOME needs them (probably before the auto mount

utility mounts the drive).



My next attempt will be to put the usb drive directly into /etc/fstab. *I have

read the blkid man page to find out the drive's UUID. *Can anyone find any

pitfalls to this approach? *Will the automount utility (it used to be HAL, but

now it might be something else) try to mount it again?



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