Partitioning Ubuntu(or any linux)

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How do you feel about moving some of the critical folders like /opt to a separate partition? This contains optimized stuff that tends to be the same from one install to the next, even from one linux to another.

I feel that this would be a smart choice however, please make sure to back up important data before partitioning as I'm sure you don't want to lose valuable data.

Do It!

Historically, "/opt" was an abbreviation for "optional" (not "optimised"). It has fallen out of favour.

Largely, the idea of using separate partitions for things has generally been dropped, although it can sometimes be useful.

Having "/boot" as a small partition near the start of a drive was essential at one stage, when HDDs went up above 1Gbyte, and the BIOS didn't like addressing the boot files if they were ouside the first patch of the drive.

I dislike mounting partitions like this, because you find it quite tedious when the front of the directory tree is not visible on the partition. I.e. if you mount "/opt" as a partition, and within that had "netscape", "fred", "jim" and "clever", the partition itself, viewed from another installation, does not show the "/opt" at all, but just has four directories at its root.

Personally, these days, I would mount the partition as "/media/hdb6", say, then do "cp -a /opt /media/hdb6", "mv /opt /old_opt" and "ln -s /media/hdb6/opt /opt". Once I was sure it was all working, I then "rm -rf /old_opt".

E.g. at this moment, I happen to have done this trick with the rather large (0.3Gig) collection of clipart in my "/usr/share/openclipart".
I.e.: /usr/share/openclipart -> /media/hda5/usr/share/openclipart
This is a convenient trick when you notice you have filled up your root partition, and need some more space. I have been known to do this with the entire "/usr".

One thing that is NOT recommended so much these days is sharing "/home" between different distribution installs. This is much better handled by careful symbolic links, to avoid configuration setting getting confused by differing versions of programs on each installation.

That was very informative lau, thank you.

How can different versions be that much of a problem? If the program complains we an just save/delete the symlink associated with said config and reinstall. I suppose we could always rm ~/.* as long as we didn't put anything important there when we're between distros, but the amount of overlap is considerable and favorable IME.

Ah no. I did not mean when replacing one distro by another... I meant the situation where one happens to use multiple distros at the same time.

E.g. using 64studio while composing music, but switching to Ubuntu for general purpose, then toying with Mandriva, and playing with another 15 distros, every one of which might have a mix of versions of OpenOffice, Apache, whatever.

OCI. 15 distros eh?

Sorry... number off the top of my head... sort of. Linux Format did a "showcase" of 14 distros this month. The double-sided DVD has ten of them on it. I guess I only have a handful of distros on this machine, at the moment. What does OCI mean?

It means I messed up OIC.

OIC... which would be one of these, I guess.

Probably "Officer In Charge", as you were presumably addressing me with the appropriate honorific.

Also...

The appropriate honorific? You mean Order of the Imitation of Christ?