HD permissions stay put

[Tim]

On Sun, 2011-07-03 at 17:49 +0200, Johan Scheepers wrote:
> I have a multiple boot internal drive (different linux 
> flavors)(excluding windows).
>  
> Have a external usb drive for backup between these different systems.
>  
> Now booting in a different flavor the permissions change to numbers.
>  
> My normal permission is johan johan. I am the only user at home.

But are those "johan" user accounts on each system using the same
numerical user ID?  If they're not, that's your problem.  The OS doesn't
care what name is associated with an ID, it's the ID that it works with.

By default, with Red Hat -derived Linuxes, the first user created is
(usually) 500.  So, for instance, if you've installed Fedora over and
over, the first username you create will have uid=500.  And if that
first user is always johan, it'll be 500.  But, if you'd created other
users first, or in different orders, they'll have different numbers.

Other OSs, such as some Debian-derived ones, start with a user ID of
1000 (last time I used one, or was it BSD?).  So it gets messier the
more different OSs you install.

It is possible to create users with specific IDs, but that can still be
a problem with multi-boot system.  Fedora, et cetera, consider IDs below
500 system IDs, and 500 and higher user IDs.  Debian, used 1000 as the
threshold.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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