On Fri, 2006-04-21 at 23:11 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
On Fri, 2006-04-21 at 16:29 -1000, Edward Haddock wrote:
> Pardon the newbie excitement but I have successfully mapped a
> half-height external USB Hard Drive as my /home and after copying /home
> in FC4 to it then booting into FC5 and mapping /home to it...presto
> bango...I am now running FC5 no worries. I did lose a few things in the
> transfer but not much. Which is quite an accomplishment for a newbie
> like myself. Matter of fact, on a back burner, I may start writing about
> this. I think that given the popularity I am seeing it may be wise to
> tell people about this kind of thing so that upgrades go easier. Plus it
> puts your data on a different partition. Anyone got any advice on what
> else should be separated like that?
Excellent, Edward! It's always a good idea to do backups of important
material like /home before upgrading or re-installing. The nice thing
about a modern operating system like Linux is that, generally, a disk is
a disk is a disk... Whether /home is on a USB hard disk, a thumb drive,
or a network share, it's all the same to Linux.
You've hit on what is simultaneously one of the most useful, yet hardest
to document, facets of system setup -- disk partitioning. People use
separate partitions for a number of reasons, and sometimes a single
system will have easily a dozen or more partitions. Some people do well
taking the defaults in anaconda, and for some it means they're in for
massive rebuilding when they realize the implications.
As an example, one of my lighter-use general servers at work uses:
/
/usr
/home
/boot
/var
/var/www
/var/ftp
/var/lib/mysql
/var/svn
swap
I've almost always used a separate /home, because I was lucky enough to
start using Linux when a Solaris-savvy friend worked next door. That we
don't push a separate /home in the installer is due to many issues,
chief among them being that when we start trying to anticipate users'
needs with so many possible choices, we invariably end up helping some
and annoying others.
We've thrown around the idea of a System Planning Guide, which would go
hand-in-hand with the Installation Guide, and talk about some of these
very basic UNIXish issues in a way that beginners could understand. It
helps, when going through the Installation Guide, to know how to make
the right choices when the installer gives you options.
I hope that you will be able to stay on track with the account setup
documentation, but it also makes great sense for someone with fresh eyes
to help us tackle this System Planning Guide as ewll.
Aloha Paul,
I actually got a little more worked out on it last night. It is a slow
but steady process with me. I am hoping to get something intelligible
together by mid-may and then we can start going over it. A System
Planning Guide sounds like an awesome idea. Perhaps after we get the
Documentation Guide on it's feet it would be a great project to
participate in.
Mahalo
Ed
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