ubuntu for novices

[Tommy Trussell]

On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 23:22:54 -0500, Travis Newman
<travis at moneyburger.com> wrote:
> So I've been thinking about repartitioning my drive to the traditional
> unix format, eg. having one partition for /home, one for /usr, one for
> /boot... And I'd like it if I didn't have to reinstall Ubuntu again.
> That may be too much to ask, but... What are the advantages of doing
> that, if anyone knows? I could (apparently) easily use the Knoppix cd to
> repartition my drive and move everything over, edit the fstab and the
> grub config and theoretically be good to go, right?

If you want to get the "traditional" UNIX experience, just put your
system into single user mode (sudo telinit 1) and use parted or
another utility to muck things up without even shutting down the
computer.

If you have the luxury of an extra drive (or a big empty space on your
existing one) it shouldn't be too hard. With or without Knoppix (or
the Ubuntu Live CD, for that matter.)

The biggest advantage to separating parts of the filesystem into
separate partitions is for ease of recovering when something goes
wrong. So, for example, if a particular computer serves as a mail
server for a company then you want to know what's going on in /var all
the time, and you want to have a way to recover when that filesystem
has problems. So you might have JUST that part of the tree on a
redundant RAID array, for example.