On 23-Jul-99 Andy Goth wrote:
>> I broke my disk up in 3 partitions. 2 Gig or so for "/root", 64M for
>> "swap", and the balance (6Gig) for "/home". This allows me to reinstall
>> (reformat <:-0 ) the /root and swap and not touch any home (user) files
>
> What about /usr and all those other directories I am forgetting?
If you made the partitions suggested above (i.e. /, /home, and a swap
partition) then basically any directory that's not under /home would be under /,
so the /usr directory would be in the / partition.
> So, what if I install some great package and then have to reformat and
> reinstall the OS? How can I salvage that great package?
Well, there are a couple ways you could deal with that. One would be to keep
all of the packages you download in a directory under your home directory,
assuming you have a separate /home partition as suggested above. Then when you
reinstall, choose not to reformat /home, then you will have 1) all the packages
still there in your home directory ready to be reinstalled and 2) the
configuration files for most of your programs, so that when you reinstall they
probably won't have to be reconfigured.
Another way you could do it, if you don't want to even have to reinstall the
program, is to make a /usr/local partition (most programs that aren't part of
the distribution install in /usr/local by default), and put all the extra
programs you install there. Then, as with /home, choose not to reformat
/usr/local when you reinstall.
-Tom
