🚀 go-pugleaf

On Tue, 30 Oct 2012, in the Usenet newsgroup aus.computers.linux, in article
<k6mv7o$kuu$1@dont-email.me>, Jordan wrote:

Hmmm... no replies yet?

>I'm new (ish) to Linux, using Ubuntu.
>How compulsory is the default folder structure?

It's your system, you can do as you wish.   But in reality, there is
a relative standard way of doing things - battle tested over 30+ years
of the UNIX operating systems.   You might want to start with the
"Filesystem Hierarchy Standard"  from http://www.pathname.com/fhs/ and
an explanatory guide named "Linux Filesystem Hierarchy" available from
http://tldp.org/guides.html.

>I'm running out of space on my hard drive.

Do you know why (found a bunch of neat stuff to download,  or didn't
plan ahead to be doing so) or is it another mystery?

>Anything wrong with placing my stuff on another one?

Nothing at all.  More experienced users may intentionally divide
things up such that /home/ is located on a different partition of the
same drive, or on a separate drive entirely.   The rational is that
the installer program used when you update/replace your current
version can do it's thing on the main Linux partition, and it won't
mess with other partitions/disks so you have all of "your" files and
stuff on the new one.

[fermi ~]$ df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             33661668   3384696  28567052  11% /
/dev/sda2            150205500   1793556 140781876   2% /home
tmpfs                  1993988       380   1993608   1% /dev/shm
[fermi ~]$ ls /
bin   dev  home  lost+found  mnt  opt   root  selinux  sys  usr
boot  etc  lib   media       net  proc  sbin  srv      tmp  var
[fermi ~]$ grep sda /etc/fstab
/dev/sda1       /          ext3     defaults    1 1
/dev/sda2       /home      ext3     defaults    1 1
/dev/sda3       swap       swap     defaults    0 0
[fermi ~]$

What I did here is to install on the first partition.  There is an
EMPTY directory called /home on that partition.  The second line in
/etc/fstab shown causes the second partition with all of my users and
user files and stuff to be mounted automatically at boot in that
empty point - and now when I look in /home/ibuprofin/ I find all of
my stuff.  This is essentially the only changes needed.  The entry in
the password file is "normal"

[fermi ~]$ grep ibuprofin /etc/passwd
ibuprofin:x:504:100:Moe Trin:/home/ibuprofin:/bin/bash
[fermi ~]$

so everything is transparent.  The other (normal) users on the system
also have their directories on /dev/sda2 which has a directory
structure like

  home/user1  ---> and all of that user's stuff
  home/user2  ---> and so on

What I did to make the change was to

  1. use mkfs.ext3  to create a filesystem on the new place (same
     idea as "format d:")
  2. mount the new partition TEMPORARILY in /mnt   (command syntax is
     "mount /dev/sda2 /mnt")
  3. Move all the stuff from /home/* to /mnt/*  keeping the same
     directory structure - many ways to do that
  4. UNmount the new partition ("umount /dev/sda2")
  5. mount the new partition over the "old" /home  ((command syntax is
     "mount /dev/sda2 /home")
  6. edit /etc/fstab and add the line telling the system to mount the
     new partition as shown above.

>Am I making sense?

Yup - except we don't call them "folders" - that's a windoze term
stolen from the Macintosh operating system who in turn stole it from
Xerox in the early 1980s.  They're called "directories".   ;-)

        Old guy