On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, Robert G. Scofield wrote:
> According to the Installation Guide for RedHat 6.1 you should create
> only these partitions unless you have a reason to do otherwise:
Guidelines. You can ignore them freely. Everyone has his/her own reason
for partitioning things his/her own way. I like:
/ (where all distribution-specific stuff goes)
/usr/local (default install place for all downloaded programs)
/home (so I can save my work across upgrades)
swap (since it's good to have virtual memory)
And /boot if / doesn't fit under 1024 cylinder thing.
> Scenario 1: I misuse rm -r and decide that I have to re-install RedHat
> 6.1.
Don't do it. Put -i on rm alias.
> Scenario 2: I decide to install (not upgrade to) RedHat 7.0 over RedHat
> 6.1.
If you use my partition settings, you can:
1. Archive /etc in case you'll need config stuff later for customization
2. Format / partition
3. Install 7.0 to / partition.
And everything you had before is still there, including home and
downloaded programs.
> Scenario 3: I decide to install Suse over RedHat 6.1.
Same as above.
> Now is the advantage in having separate partitions that in each of these
> scenarios I can install over RedHat 6.1 without wiping out my files in
> /home and my application programs in /usr/local? I know that if
> everything is under /, a re-installation will wipe out all of my
> programs and files. So is this the main point in having separate
> partitions?
There are many many reasons for having partitions. One common reason is
for when one partition gets damaged, you'll still have other partitions
safe. Multiple Linux distributions is one reason -- you can have SuSE on
/dev/hda1 and Debian on /dev/hda2 yet have the same /home on /dev/hda3 and
swap on /dev/hda4... -- this way you can try out different distributions
without having separate /home and /swap.
> Is what I am suggesting true? Would it be possible to install Suse over
> RedHat and expect my programs to run as usual?
Pretty much. Some upgrades may be necessary if /usr/local has programs
that require a certain version of some runtime library, in which case
either the program or the librarie(s) need to be upgraded.
-Mark
---
Mark K. Kim
http://www.cbreak.org/mark/
PGP key available upon request.
