nfs mount home advice

[gtpl]

How do you handle different window managers if you automount home from a server? Things fell apart when I attempted to mount an exported home directory which had worked fine for a trio of linux mint gloria workstations. When I tried the same trick with an Ubuntu 9.10 RC it was a disaster. Basically, I could get Apps to run, e.g., Firefox and Thunderbird, or terminal, etc. However there was nothing in (whatever you call) the outer frame of the window manager. i.e., the Applications, Places, System, etc. on top were missing and if I minimized a window it just disappeared - no icon to bring it back. I presume the issue is some 'tweaks' that mint did to the gnome window manager. I was able to recover by deleting my /home/foo directory and then replacing it with the (thankfully) saved in /tmp tar image prior to the mount.

What am i missing here, and what is the recommended procedure? I would really like to have a common home directory for ubuntu, mint, opensolaris, and arch workstations. I am using the opensolaris box as the nfs server.

[countach44]

Do you have the same version of gnome installed with all the same plugins and themes on all the boxes?
The only way to really ensure similar functionality based on stuff stashed in your homedir is to make sure all the software accessing your configuration files (i.e. .gnome2) is the same.

I have used my kde homedir across RHEL5 and Solaris 10 with no problem... I think gnome tends to be a little touchier, but I could be wrong...

[gtpl]

The gnome versions are different. Taking a step back on this, I decided to do things a slightly different way. Besides the obvious advantages of a similar look and feel with a shared home, my major motivation was to check mail from different machines. I use thunderbird on a mix of linux, opensolaris, and winxp machines. It's easy to keep track of things on a single dual boot machine, but not with several different machines. After thinking through that, I decided to set up sendmail/dovecot - imap on aserver and then check mail through my imap server with thunderbird on the other machines. For the shared directory stuff (currently a work in progress), I am going to leave the normal home directory alone and keep things I need to look the same as an automounted my-shares. My firefox initialization stuff (.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini) will point to ~/my-shares.

Thanks,