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Windows Linux dual install

Taiko2k edited this page Jan 15, 2023 · 33 revisions

⚠️ This is experimental. There may be unforeseen consequences of doing this.

If you dual boot Windows and Linux, its possible to share application data across the two installs using symlinks.

In this scenario we have:

  • A Windows drive with an install of Tauon.
  • A Linux drive with an install of Tauon.
  • A drive that contains your music collection, mountable by both systems. (i.e NTFS formatted). Ill refer to this as the '3rd drive'.

How to set up

This uses Linux Tauon as your existing main Tauon install. We will delete any existing Tauon user data in Windows. (If you're coming from a main Windows install, get in touch.)

Recommend only importing tracks under Linux! Tracks imported while in Windows using this method won't be available back in Linux.

The gist of it is we move Tauon's user data directory to the 3rd drive and create appropriate links to it so that both installs are sharing a single user data directory.

Here ill assume your music collection is on E:\music under Windows, corresponding to /mnt/mydrive/music under Linux.

Ill also assume your username is me, change where appropriate.

  1. Under Linux, find your Tauon user data directory. (You can find it in Tauon by going "MENU" > "Settings..." > "Function" > "Open data folder"). Here ill assume its /home/me/.local/share/TauonMusicBox.
  2. Backup that folder to a safe location in case something goes wrong.
  3. Move that folder to somewhere on your 3rd drive, say /mnt/mydrive/TauonMusicBox/.
  4. Create link ln -s /mnt/mydrive/TauonMusicBox/ /home/me/.local/share/.
  5. Under Windows, delete existing data dir C:\Users\me\AppData\Local\TauonMusicBox.
  6. Open elevated CMD (not powershell)...
  7. Create link mklink /D C:\Users\me\AppData\Local\TauonMusicBox E:\TauonMusicBox.
  8. Now we need to get your music working. Recreate the path to your music library how it looks in Linux but under C:\ as if it were root, so for example make folders C:\mnt\mydrive\music
  9. Create link mklink /D C:\mnt\mydrive\music E:\music.
  10. Done!

Flatpak note: Flatpak may require explicit permission on the local data dir link sudo flatpak override com.github.taiko2k.tauonmb --filesystem=/home/me/.var/app/com.github.taiko2k.tauonmb/data/TauonMusicBox

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