[ILUG] Newbie Question: Installing software on RH

[Aaron McDaid]

> So my question is: What should my general strategy for installing new
> software ???
> I'm a little confused :-)

Use symlinks! Move some of the bigger dirs in /usr to somewhere (anywhere)
and symlink them.

>      /dev/hda1 66333 50719 12189 81% /
>     /dev/hda7 50717 2395 45703 5% /boot
>     /dev/hda5 1162695 20651 1081969 2% /home
>     /dev/hda9 398124 364906 12657 97% /usr
>     /dev/hda8 991000 32 939765 0% /usr/local
>     /dev/hda10 242015 6945 222573 3% /var

I suggest putting /usr/X11R6 into /var for a start. The difference
between what I'm doing and your setup is that you are using a full
partition to hold /usr/local whereas I'm moving any directory (with
or without subdirs) to anywhere at all. I was using a setup similar
to yours for a while but it just broke pretty quickly.

My hard disk is a complete mess with regard to the paritioning and I
can't think of a way to fix it without getting another/bigger one - 
unless there is a partition resizer(and joiner?) thing for ext2

So my solution is to move the odd biggish directory to an empty
partition and set up a link for it.
The nice thing about this is that the "overflow" partition can be
used to hold several directories whereas your /usr/local
>     /dev/hda8 991000 32 939765 0% /usr/local
only holds one.

My /d holds /usr/X11R6/lib /home/hoss and /usr/src/redhat



I would prefer to just have one big / partition but I can't at the
min. With the right software I can see the advantages of putting things
like /home on different partitions.

Anyone want to write a GPLed clone of Partition Magic?