Thank you to Howard, Michael and Ershad for taking the trouble to reply
to my questions.
I would like, even if it's unnecessary, to explain why I don't feel I
can accept just yet the suggestion by both Michael and Ershad that I
erase FC3.
When I decided to switch to Linux, I was gradually able to find
applications to replace all of those I'd used in Windows, including
those with which I'd managed my finances.
I don't feel that I can take the chance, by erasing FC3 now, of losing
immediate access to those applications and to the data generated by
them. When, after getting FC6 going, I am sure that I can do in it what
I presently do in FC3, then I'll be willing to get rid of FC3.
As to the issue of moving FC3 directories from the hard drive to the
external USB drive, it would undoubtedly have been better for me to get
information about the state of my hard drive before bothering people
with my questions. However, belatedly using an application called
JDiskReport, I now find that, of all of the directories below / on the
hard drive on which I want to install FC6, only two of them, usr (3.5GB)
and home (1.5GB), exceed 1GB in size, which seems to me to be the lower
limit of directory size to be worrying about for present purposes. (In
any event, the next biggest directory is opt, which is only 345.2MB.)
As to /usr, Michael says I can't have that on a vfat filesystem, which
is how my external drive is presently formatted. I could fix that by
shrinking the sole partition on the external drive and creating an ext3
partition in the new free space. I could easily make that partition big
enough to hold usr and home, since there are presently 73GB free on the
external drive.
As to Howard's and Michael's suggestions as to how to move home and usr
respectively, to my dim understanding, they seem both to depend on the
ability to mount one directory in a partition, as opposed to mounting
the entire partition. I don't think I knew that could be done, so I'll
now go away and read about the mount command.
Thanks again to all,
Leslie
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