Making a single disk Gnu/Linux $HOME survive re-installation

[Steve Pomeroy]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 11:13:18PM -0400, Bill Ricker wrote:
> > Generally, I Google/Wikipedia
> > search every command I don't fully understand in a HOWTO especially since
> > the technical jargon of man pages  flies over my head.
> 
> man pages have sadly been written to explain --options to those who
> know which command they need and not answer "what is this good for"
> since Unix was on one PDP-7, before they invented C. :-(  Which is no
> excuse to continue the trend but ...

Another source of information about commands that can be useful is the
documentation that comes with a package. You can usually find it in:
   /usr/share/doc/PACKAGENAME

There, there are often files that end in .gz. You can use zless to view
them. Ubuntu compresses these files to reduce disk space; the compressed
versions of which have ".gz" at the end of their names to indicate that.

> >  The simple layman
> > details I look for don't exist in your description, there are simply too
> > many steps that aren't clear to me. I don't understand why you want me to
> > add this line to /etc/fstab or what "/var/local/home /home none rw,bind 0 0"
> > means.
> 
> true enough

In Debian and Ubuntu, most common config files come with man pages. You
can usually find these pages by doing:
   man 5 FILENAME

(the number 5? man is split up into sections based on context. Section 5
is for files. See man 1 man for details)

One I need to look up all the time is the /etc/network/interfaces
format.
   man 5 interfaces

For the above:
   man 5 fstab

Looking at that on my machine, it doesn't really explain what
anything in "fstab" means to someone who doesn't know what mount
points are yet. However, if you pick out some keywords and guess at
another man page, "man mount", that pages explains how the file system
can be mounted. 

There are often "SEE ALSO" pointers at the bottom of the
man page. The number after them is the section of the man pages that
they are in (same number as above). This is a good start if you are
looking to try and grok how the technical bits fit together.

> -- 
> Bill
> n1vux at arrl.net bill.n1vux at gmail.com
> 
> -- 
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-- 
Steve Pomeroy
http://staticfree.info/
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