Sharing an encrypted home folder between Ubuntu and Kubuntu 9.10

Question

I have a drive partitioned into three sections: two small ones and one large one. (Let's call them partitions A, B, C).

Partition A has Ubuntu 9.10 installed on it, with partition C mounted as /home. When I installed Ubuntu, I chose to encrypt my home folder.

Now, I'd like to isntall Kubuntu on partition B, and use the same home folder for both OSes.

How do I set up Kubuntu 9.10 to re-use the same folder, and give it the decryption key? (which I wrote down when I installed Ubuntu, of course).

why don't you just install the kubuntu desktop inside ubuntu? — phunehehe, Nov 12 '09 at 11:58
Right, the Ubuntu docs site has good instructions on adding the Kubuntu to a default Ubuntu (=Kubuntu), and then turning it off at will (back to Gnome, but KDE apps are still available). You may not need a full second install. (Unless, of course, you do...) — ScoBe, Nov 12 '09 at 12:05
So your question is a valid one but I agree with the above comments; Look here: help.ubuntu.com/community/InstallingKDE — pbr, Nov 12 '09 at 22:33
Mostly, because I don't like to mix up my usable OS with my experimentation. I've found that updates, dist-upgrades, and whatnot tend to break when I experiment with alternate desktop environemnts/distros. In the past, when I tried this, I got a whole mess. But your suggestion is encouraging. Maybe I'll try that again. — Jono, Nov 13 '09 at 8:19
Oh, and one of the complications that just occurred to me, is that I can no longer access files in my /home folder from Windows... Didn't think of that when I encrypted the whole thing. After all, I couldn't even remember the last time I'd used Windows on this machine. — Jono, Nov 13 '09 at 11:34

pbr · Accepted Answer · 2009-11-12 22:34:46Z

1

So there are a lot of details of this exposed here: http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7568/

If you can't determine a reasonable answer to your question from the 3 pages of article there, maybe the author of the article can help.

answered Nov 12 '09 at 22:34

pbr

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Yeah, there's a LOT of info there. Thank FSM for weekends. – Jono Nov 13 '09 at 8:19

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