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. -- Paul W. Frields, RHCE http://paul.frields.org/ gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717 Fedora Documentation Project: http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/docs/
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