installation question

[cfdman]

i currently have 32 bit kubuntu 10.10 installed on my computer with the following partitions:

/ 30 GB
/home 952 GB
swap 6 GB

i now want to install 64 bit kubuntu 11.10 because my system is a 64 bit system and i want to be able to access my full 6GB ram. i want to install such that both 32 and 64 bit are available to me when grub comes up. i was thinking of shrinking my /home partition by 30GB and adding a 30GB partition to install 11.10. is this ok? i do not want to lose my data as that would be catastrophic.

[dibl]

Re: installation question

Yes, your plan will work. However, here are two points to consider:

- back up your data before you shrink the data partition, for safety

- if you mount your data partition as /home for both OSs, then it is important that you use the same desktop settings and package configuration settings in both OSs, because there will be only a single set of configuration settings files (the hidden dot files). A better approach, IMHO, is to install the full OS including /home in the root filesystem partition, and then to symlink your user data (DOCS, IMAGES, MUSIC, etc.) in to the /home folder in your /user directory. This way, you do not need to worry about the configuration settings conflicting between 2 different OS installations.