Problem accessing /home from different partition

Question

I'm currently using Chakra on /sda1 and Fuduntu on /sda2 (a partition I keep for trying out and playing around with distros), and both systems use /sda3 for each different /home partition (I'll call them 'Chakrahome' and 'Fuduntuhome').

Usually I never had problems accessing either /home folder (on /sda2 I've had Elementary, Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Antix, Crunchbang and others), so I would just keep my files in 'Chakrahome' folder, linking them to the other system. Since installing Fuduntu though I am denied permission when trying to access Chakrahome, thus making all my files unavailable.

I'm not sure whether it's an issue with Fuduntu or not, but I've never messed with permissions so I would like some input on how to solve this empasse. Thank you very much!

Answer 1

Likely the UIDs differ between your user accounts on the two systems. Filesystem permissions are handled by using owner/group/all permissions, and whilst these may be displayed with a username when using tools like ls, in reality these use unique numeric identifiers to identify the user.

You can synchronise the UIDs by choosing a UID free on both systems, and then issuing usermod -u [uid] [username] on both systems.

After this, update the permissions on your home directory:

chmod -R [username] ~[username]

Answer 2

I believe fuduntu has SELinux enabled by default, perhaps your shared home directory isn't properly labeled as a home directory? You could run restorecon -R -v /home in Funduntu to restore the SELinux labels, although I have no idea if Chakra uses SELinux, or if the new SELinux labels are portable to another distro.