Of course, simply delete the /home partition and extend / to take up its space.
Or do a completely custom partitioning and create only a / and a swap partition.
I always do this myself because frankly, there’s no good reason for an extra /home partition. You’re just limited then to the sizes you picked for / and /home, and if you find that either is too small, there’s no easy remedy. With only one / partition, there’s nothing to worry about.
When installing a newer version of your distro (or even a different distro), it’s generally better to do a clean install and start with clean settings, so you’re sure that nothing there from your old installation is causing trouble. You still can easily copy over any settings you want to keep. Any documents, pictures etc. are easily copied over as well. No need for a separate partition.
I strongly recommend that you install from the install dvd rather than from the live cd, you’ll have a much better experience then.
I’ll have to say that it’s probably the only thing that the merde-coloured distros get right.
I always find it very annoying when other distros try to shove a separate /home partition down my throat
Sorry, but that’s not a sound argument. You can simply do a Ctrl+A to select all folders, then deselect the /home folder and delete the rest. Does just the same thing and certainly isn’t hard to do. Again, no need for a separate /home partition.
Atom monkey,
if you put your home directory in the root partition you not only lose portability of your personal files you must realize that as space on your
/home/user increases space for your system files and programs decreases. and vice versa as you add more programs etc. the available space for your personal files decrease. this is fine if you have a lot of disk space but if you have limited space then it makes more sense to keep the two in separate partitions.
The problem I have had with a separate partition for home where space is limited is that you can only guess at the appropriate size for root and home.At some stage I run out space in one or the other,then comes the inevitable resize and move of partitions.Not only frustrating but also introduces a risk.In this situation if home is in the root partition and you run short of space you can then remove applications that are no longer needed or remove data from your home directory or both.this free space is then available for any purpose,no resize and move of partitions needed.For portability of personal files I use my DVD writer.
Fully agree - with /home on the root partition, you have much more flexibility.
Portability is no good point for a separate partition, you can still easily copy files over and back them up with a single partition, ho real difference there.
I have had a problem with having them separate. I had filled up my home partition and was unable to log in to KDE. I had to switch to tty 1 and rm a bunch of files from there because I had made my home partition too small. Now I always use a single partition(I only allocate 20 GB to each Linux distribution I am running so it is quite reasonable).
On Sun, 17 Jan 2010 18:46:02 +0000, Tokugawa-Ieyasu wrote:
> Sorry, but that’s not a sound argument. You can simply do a Ctrl+A to
> select all folders, then deselect the /home folder and delete the rest.
> Does just the same thing and certainly -isn’t- hard to do. Again, no
> need for a separate /home partition.
The amazing thing about Linux is that different people can do things
differently. Rather than do a “select all folders” and delete
everything, some prefer to start with a clean partition instead. IMHO,
that’s much easier and faster, and doesn’t risk accidental deletion of
other partitions created for various reasons.
So yes, it’s a perfectly reasonable argument - just because you don’t
accept it doesn’t mean it’s not reasonable.
On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 21:16:02 +0000, Tokugawa-Ieyasu wrote:
> Fully agree - with /home on the root partition, you have much more
> flexibility.
And more risk, too, in some views. You have a process that goes crazy
creating stuff in your home directory - do you want it to potentially
take the whole system down?
As Taralkeda said, advantages and drawbacks to both. That’s one reason
that the flexibility is nice to have. Not everyone uses their systems
the way you use yours.
Yes, somebody already mentioned that during the install you can delete the extra home partition and make one bigger partition. I always do it that way because I don’t like wasting disk space. No matter how big the drive is.
IMO all important data should reside on it’s own partition. If you are just playing with Linux then it probably does not matter. In my case I chose Linux to be my main OS. I only run Windows in a VM. But since my buisness depends on Windows (I write Windows programs) I made a separate partition mounted as /vm to hold my VMs They are safe from upgrades and other things that may effect my root partition. I also have a separate home for email and other documents that I must preserve. If you run an Oracle or mySQL DB that contains mission critical data it is good put it on a separate partition. If you are only devoting 20 gig to an OS you are just playing with it and are not a serious user or you are just using it for testing purposes.
