OK, what idiot decided...
2004-12-20 12:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mdlbear... that you can only have one home directory?
It used to be that Unix programs got your configuration files from whatever directory was set as the value of the environment variable $HOME. This let you have multiple logins with different home directories, shells, or what-have-you. For example, I usually have two home directories, one on my desktop machine and one on the fileserver. Both logins have the same numeric user ID.
Now, however, there are a lot of programs (Java comes to mind, but Firefox has the same problem, which it apparently shares with everything in Gnome) that look up your userID in /etc/passwd and go to the first home directory they find. STUPID! Actually, Firefox isn't consistent: it finds your profile using $HOME, but your .gtkrc-2.0 file by userID. IDIOTS!
It used to be that Unix programs got your configuration files from whatever directory was set as the value of the environment variable $HOME. This let you have multiple logins with different home directories, shells, or what-have-you. For example, I usually have two home directories, one on my desktop machine and one on the fileserver. Both logins have the same numeric user ID.
Now, however, there are a lot of programs (Java comes to mind, but Firefox has the same problem, which it apparently shares with everything in Gnome) that look up your userID in /etc/passwd and go to the first home directory they find. STUPID! Actually, Firefox isn't consistent: it finds your profile using $HOME, but your .gtkrc-2.0 file by userID. IDIOTS!