On 03/05/2015 08:16 AM, Basil Chupin wrote:
On 05/03/15 23:45, Anton Aylward wrote:
On 03/04/2015 06:52 PM, A. den Oudsten wrote:
On my desktop I deleted the partitions / and /home in order to make a I can understand deleting the ROOT partition but i don't understand deleting /home.
I can - and I never keep my /home partition because keeping the settings more often than not leads to problems when a new version of oS is installed.
However......
The reason I say this is that i have done that in the past but retained all the personalized settings, no only of the desktop layout but all the dot files for various othr applications whose settigns I wanted to keep.
.....what I *do* do is create a folder on another drive - let's call it 'Hotel' - and I put all the _important_ folders there - eg, Downloads, Correspondence, .mozilla, .thunderbird, whatever you think is important to you - and then create SYMLINKS to them from the /home directory. Doing it this way, I can safely format a drive without any worry when installing a new version of oS because all the important files I need are already safely sitting in another place. All I then need to do is to (re)create the symlinks to the files in /Hotel/<whatever> .
It seems rather rococo and misses out on a lot. The "lot" are things in /etc, for example, things like the Apache and the postfix settings. I suppose a lot of stuff that _was_ in /etc could be subsumed by using LDAP or YP, but that just means its on another machine -- the database server -- or is on /var and OOPS! That's been deleted or formatted. *sigh* But what the heck! If you're using YOP and all that then you could the persoanlised files on the server as a roaming mount using NFS. I've done taht for varying degrees up to an indlcuing having all of ~anton being on NFS and /home on the workstation(s) being empty and having /home/<user> created dynmically by the login process -- see PAM for details. Its all well documented. Heck, SUN was doing this back in the 1980s.
There is also another advantage to this and that is that I can have - like I do/did have at least a couple of versions of openSUSE installed and by using the symlinks I can use the same files - eg, Downloads or Correspondence - from all the installed versions.
Quite apart from my NFS example above, this could be done quite simply with retaining a /home PROVIDED the versions weren't too far apart. As for things like ~/Downloads, or in my case ~/Documents and ~/Photogrpahy, that's all application level stuff. If you have problems with tar or zip unpacking downloads between different versions of Suse then there is something very, very wrong. As I've mentioned before, I use LVM and I have many partitions under the mapper. I have ~/Downloads and ~/Documents as mountable partitions that survive the Ginnungagap of the end of one release and the initiation of the next as a 'hard' upgrade. Mounting is straight forward and this technique can be used regardless of whether that part of the tree is local/LVM or on a NFS server. My experience is that preserving the settings in the DOT files under ~anton and ~root is very important. The times I've had problems with this can be counted on the thumb of one hand and involved changing from mandrive to suse. Within suse there is a lot more compatibility. The changes are easy to categorise. 1. Things you *should* always keep and which *always* survive These are things like the .profile and which are very personally customised and which will always survive up[grades. Bash is bash and will be forward compatible. 2. Things that silently upgrade the config My experience is that applications like GIMP do this. When 2.8 replaced 2.6 all the config moved and the 2.6 directories were emptied. I've met a few like that, 3. Ones that upgrade noisily. They tell you. 4. One that the the developers have modified so much that the old is no longer compatible. Sometimes this applies to the data files as well as the config. It has nothing to do with upgrading the OS itself, it is about the application. It *may* be included in an OS upgrade, as KDE4 was, but it also happens independently, such as the change from perl5 to perl6. All in all I think the idea of deleting all of /home is not a good idea. -- A: Yes. > Q: Are you sure? >> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. >>> Q: Why is top posting frowned upon? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org