On 05/02/2018 05:39 PM, Samuel Sieb wrote:
On 05/02/2018 02:24 PM, Temlakos wrote:
> One of you (I don't know who it was) shared with me an excellent
> method of making possible a clean reinstallation of Fedora--going
> above and beyond the "manual upgrade" described in the Installation
> Guide, that amounts to erasing the /root directory but leaving alone
> all other directories, not only /home but /usr, /etc, /bin, /tmp,
> /var, and any others I might have left out. This method preserves
> user data on a physically separate filesystem (an HDD or SSD). But it
> does not mount this separate filesystem as /home. The /home directory
> remains a part of the main filesystem and gets erased and
> reinaugurated, just like /usr, /etc, /var, and all the rest of them.
I really don't understand what the benefit of this is. Your /home
directory should be on a separate partition from / and won't be erased
even with a full reinstall of the OS.
> $ sudo mkdir /crypt
>
> $ sudo mount -t ext4 /dev/sdb2 /crypt
>
> (Here I start with "$ sudo" instead of "#" because to get a
"#"
> prompt I have to execute "su," and that can be dangerous.)
How is "su" dangerous? Either way you're running a command as root.
I generally use "sudo -i" to get to a root prompt.
> The syntax for establishing a symlink is even simpler:
>
> ln -s /crypt/UserName/Dir
>
> where UserName is the name of a specific created user, and Dir is
> Documents, Pictures, Music, Public, Templates, Videos, and anything
> else I want to preserve from one iteration of Fedora to the next. Of
> course I have to remove the "hard" directories that Fedora normally
> sets up before I execute these link commands.
Are you trying to remove all the user configuration files as well? If
so, then just turn on "show hidden files" in Nautilus and delete the
dot directories. But of course, only do that if you really want to
have to reconfigure everything again.
The use of "/crypt" suggests that the original use may have been to
only encrypt some parts of the user folders, but that still seems way
too complicated to be useful.
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Here is the primary benefit I derived from this method. Each user's home
directory has a number of hidden files (whose names begin with a dot)
that contain configuration variables. After several iterations of the
operating system, errors accumulate in those files. This results as much
from the sheer obsolescence of certain configuration files and their
parameters as from careless handling of the desktop. In my case, I had
several icons of Mozilla Firefox in my system tray that I could not for
the life of me remove. Furthermore, a password manager I liked to use,
simply refused to load.
Mounting /home on a separate filesystem does nothing to solve the
problem of the accumulated errors of configuration. You asked whether I
have to reconfigure everything. That's just it: yes. Because especially
after several iterations of "dnf system-upgrade," the configuration is a
mess!
But mounting user data, like the contents of Documents, Pictures, etc.,
and even the contents of hidden application-specific directories like
.mozilla (for Firefox) and .thunderbird, /does/ eliminate the problem.
The errant files get erased with the rest of the filesystem, but the
good user data remains.
Now for that matter, I remind you that if you're going to mount a
separate file system as /home, you still have to use a command that will
make the mounting permanent and not something you have to execute every
time you start the system up. So maybe you can tell me what the syntax
of the mount command would be for that. I'm sure I can adapt that to the
system I borrowed from that other user.
By the way: the danger of "su" is the danger of continuous operations as
root, and forgetting that you are in fact logged in as root. Whereas
"sudo" gives you superuser privileges for that command only, then
reverts you to a non-privileged state. That stops you from deleting a
root-owned directory by accident.
Temlakos