I will soon make a fresh install of Fedora Core 4, and I have a very limited knowledge of Linux. I would like to maximize interoperability with other systems, and make backup as easy as possible.
I want to install it on my gateway machine, a Pentium3 with 2 removable IDE drive bays. Ideally, I want:
1) EASY BACKUP - on another machine I run Windows 2000 to take full advantage of my ATI All-in-Wonder 9600 pro. That machine also has 2 removable IDE drive bays, so I can copy entire partitions from one drive to the other. I cannot use Windows to copy the OS and apps while Windows is running, because some of the files are locked. I boot to DOS from a floppy, and use a DOS program (DriveStar) to copy from one hard drive to the other. Then I use the backup to work from. This works, but Windows remembers individual drive serial numbers so it assigns different drive letters and I have to change some of my links. Linux does not have this problem - hdb6 is always the second logical partition on the second drive, even if I change the second drive. Can Linux copy itself while it is running? I may even use software RAID mirroring - though that would prevent me from switching to different drives with different data in the second drive slot (or can it be turned on and off easily?)
2) SHARING DATA - users should be able to access the same /home directory whether running on the new system or on another machine on the network which is running Suse 9.0. I'm guessing that /home would not even have to be on a separate partition, though it is probably wise to do that. It would be nice if I could also share data with the Windows machine. I'm not sure if, for example, the Mozilla prefs/user files are the same for Windows as Linux, so that I could access my email from Windows or from Linux and not have the mail end up in different places.
3) SHARING APPS - I currently have Mandrake 8.1 installed on the machine that I am targeting for Fedora. It would be great if I could run some of the apps already installed with Mandrake, while I am running Fedora. It would also be nice if I could run some of the apps from the other machine running Suse. I'm guessing that this is not easy - that sharing /usr and /opt would lead to dependency issues and incompatible libraries.
4) MIGRATING TO OTHER HARDWARE - Another bonus would be if I could take my hard drive with Fedora installed, and pop it into my Pentium 4 (usually running Windows) to run an app that needs more juice. I could use LILO to present a menu containing "Fedora - machine A" and "Fedora - machine B" - but are there machine specific files in various parts of the filesystem? If Host 1 usually runs on Machine A, and Host 2 usually runs on Machine B, can I switch them without causing chaos?
If anyone has suggestions (preferably from experience) on how to accomplish any of these things, that would be great. If some of these things (especially 3 & 4) are not possible, please let me know.