Hi. I have opensuse 12.2 installed on a small SSD boot drive, and am curious how I choose install locations for programs. I also have a larger storage drive (500gb HD) where I would like to install most non-os software. How do I go about doing this?
Can I just ask
My OS programs all go to /
And it’s 20GB
Is that too big to have on the SSD
My guesss is that you have a misconception about where software packages are installed. You do in general not choose where programs/libraries/configuration files go. That is allready fixed.
First there is not allways a clear difference between what you call os-software and non-os-software. All software packages you install from the standard (and most other) repositories have the places where the different components go defined inside those packages.
Thus a package installation can put files in /usr/bin, /usr/share, /usr/lib and in several subdirectories of them (and more). It would be very tedious to put hat somewhere else without destroying the functionality of the package.
Only thing one can do is create a seperate partition for e.g. .usr/share and that would offload all in there (from all packages that have files in there) to that partition from your root partition. In the same way that having a seperate partition for /home does for all inside /home. This has some advantages (and could be an emergency action when the root partition is ful). but it has also some disadvantages.
On 2013-01-18 20:56, hcvv wrote:
> My guesss is that you have a misconception about where software
> packages are installed. You do in general not choose where
> programs/libraries/configuration files go. That is allready fixed.
>
> First there is not allways a clear difference between what you call
> os-software and non-os-software. All software packages you install from
> the standard (and most other) repositories have the places where the
> different components go defined inside those packages.
There was a directory reserved for some software not originated from the
distro: /opt. I don’t have a reference for that, though. When I install
something (proprietary or not) without an rpm but an install script I
sometimes choose that directory. Calibre from sources, for instance.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4, with Evergreen, x86_64 “Celadon” (Minas Tirith))
That is correct. When it is not an RPM, you have some liberty. And /opt is (was once?) an option. /usr/local is another one, but that is inside /usr, not a good candidate for a seperate fs. And /opt isn’t either when you do not realy fill it at least with several GB.
And further option is when you install as an end-user for yourself (not advised for sophisticated things). Then it goes into /home (/home/bin for the executables) and it is (when you have a seperate /home) outside your root partition. But again not realy a big deal normaly.
A general remark about this subject of where to put what. The layout and usage of disk partitions is something that is realy to be done before the installation. It is allways very tedious to change things later when one comes to the idea that one wants to accomodate a big web-site with a big database. Too late 
What is " small "? Like Caf4926 says, 20 GB is enough, by far, even with a couple of larger games and GNOME and KDE. Please note that there’s a huge difference in disk usage by system- and user software between linux and the Redmond OS.
AFAIK a default KDE install is less than 6 GB, still has an extensive software choice: the KDE apps, Firefox, LibreOffice, GIMP etc. etc…
I have a 20 GB root partition and use 5 GB. Very comfortable. I think the OP has a non problem 
On 2013-01-18 22:36, hcvv wrote:
> That is correct. When it is not an RPM, you have some liberty. And /opt
> is (was once?) an option. /usr/local is another one, but that is inside
> /usr, not a good candidate for a seperate fs. And /opt isn’t either
> when you do not realy fill it at least with several GB.
There is a reason to use separate filesystem for both, though: that when
you do an upgrade via fresh install, you can keep them by not formatting
them, same as home. /usr/local is for programs you make or build
yourself, and /opt is for external sources. Well, the filesytem
hierarchy doc would say what they are for really.
I do have them on separate partitions. Even /usr/src I put on another
one, because I want it on reiserfs because it makes for much faster builds.
> A general remark about this subject of where to put what. The layout
> and usage of disk partitions is something that is realy to be done
> before the installation. It is allways very tedious to change things
> later when one comes to the idea that one wants to accomodate a big
> web-site with a big database. Too late
It is indeed. A method is not to partition everything from the start,
leave free space.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4, with Evergreen, x86_64 “Celadon” (Minas Tirith))
If you do that SSD may not serve its original purpose of making application start ups instantaneous