Skip to main content

Sharing one home directory between the Linux machines with the different display resolutions and different pointing devices, keeping $HOME/.config data for each machine

 Back in 1990's, it was common practice to share one home directory between many UNIX servers using NFS. But it is not in these days.

But I have become to want to share my home directory between two different Linux machines: One is  a Debian GNU/Linux installed as a primary OS of a dual boot machine,  and the other is a virtualized Linux box within the Virtualbox running under the Windows 10, a secondary OS of the dual-boot.

They have different display resolutions and pointing devices. These differences led me to an annoying problem: if you open GNOME desktop environment, display and pointing device setting became broken.

Today's GNOME desktop environment stores most of the settings to the files under $HOME/.config directory. But if you share $HOME/.config between two machines, the stored configuration for a particular machine may become incompatible with other machines with different display resolutions and pointing devices.

Indeed, my GNOME desktop has become unusable.


To overcome this problem I renamed $HOME/.config directory to the name which have host name as a suffix.

According to XDG Base Directory Specification, alternative directory of $HOME/.config can be specified with the environment variable XDG_CONFIG_HOME.

So, you can set XDG_CONFIG_HOME like:


$ cat /etc/profile.d/xdg_config.sh

XDG_CONFIG_HOME=$HOME/.config-`hostname`
export XDG_CONFIG_HOME

 

Of cource, the different machines must have different names.

This solution is working perfect for me.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The final update to Debian 11 has come

Recently, the 11th point release of Debian 11 has been announced, and it will be the last one. For I am still maintaining one Debian 11 machine, I am starting to prepare its upgrade to Debian 12. Because it is a dual boot machine, I must not forget about the change of grub OS probing. Before I ugrade, I have to add  GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false to / etc/default/grub,  or I lose grub menu for Windows OS.  Another thing that impacts me is the change of gnome-text-editor. In Debian 11, gnome-text-editor is a kind of alias of gedit controlled under the Debian alternative system with update-alternatives command. On the other hand, a new package gnome-text-editor appears in Debian 12, and it is a different thing from gedit. For I am an uim user, I was confused when I tried to use launch a Japanese input method via uim on gnome-text-editor in Debian 12, for it wouldn't work as in Debian 11. Yes, these two things are important reminder to me.
Post a Comment
Read more

Data migration tool from Figaro's Password Manager 2

Figaro's Password Manager 2 was my favorite password management tool. It is GTK2-application to preserve and manage your pairs of ID and password secretly with cipher. To my regret, its Debian package was orphaned many years ago and I thought it was time to switch to another password management tool. But besides finding a good alternative choice, I had a big problem: migration. Figaro's Password Manager 2 does have data export function, but only in special XML format. If you want to move your data to a different application, you have to change the format of the data even if the application can import the data. As my next password management tool is KeePass2 or KeePassXC , I need a XML to CSV data converter. So, I have been developing the conversion tool very slowly and finally, completed. Today, I published it on GitHub , which I named fpm2_csv . The history of the code is quite embarrassing, but very few people in the world would be interested in it, that doesn't matte...
Post a Comment
Read more

Epson MFP EP-977A3 and Linux box

Just a report of a hardware device usage for reminder.   EPSON EP-977A3 is a multi-functional peripheral for personal use once sold in Japanese market.   It has color printer, color flat-bed scanner, USB memory RW capability with USB and both wired and wireless LAN connectivity.  With the simple-scan software, whose package name is 'simple-scan' in Debian 10, I am able to scan documents from the flat-bed scanner of EPSON EP-977A3 connecting with my Debian box with an USB cable.   But when I tried to start scanning on the control panel of the scanner device, I got error with a message saying "The computer is not ready". I guessed if the scanned package for that purpose and installed it. Still, I got the same error message. Hmm... I need more research.
Post a Comment
Read more