Reorganising F11 partitions - how to?

[Tim]

On Thu, 2009-11-26 at 19:19 +0100, DB wrote:
> When I first installed F11 on the laptop, I setup several partitions 
> (suggestions from O'Reilly's "running Linux"...), which now doesn't
> seem such a good idea or necessary idea.

Not knowing exactly what advice you read, I can only say that sometimes
it's a good idea, othertimes it's not.  You can subdivide problems with
partitions (e.g. a user filling up /home isn't going to be able to put
logging out of action in /var).  But you need a drive that's big enough,
with *plenty* of space to spare, if you're going to use separate
partitions.
> 
> What I'd like to do  is to move the contents of /usr /local & /tmp
> from their individual partitions into the / partition & delete the
> individual (now empty) partitions, sharing the space out amongs /
> and /Home.
>
> Q1. Is this possible?

Yes.  But if you're not running out of space, I'd suggest leaving things
be.  If you are short on space, then sure, go ahead and rearrange.

> Q2. Do I a) do the mv (or cp + rm) of the contents then b) use KDE4 
> Partitionmanager to unmount the partitions & modify the space and c) 
> remove the unneeded entries from fstab, restart & all is OK?

You don't need anything in /tmp, it's all temporary files.  Just have
your fstab point to the /tmp that you want to use, and delete the old
one.  If /tmp is a directory in /, then you shouldn't need any mention
of it in the fstab file.  Likewise for the rest of the directory tree
(you mount partitions onto directories, and if you don't, the
directories are used as they are).

For the safety's sake, I'd suggest copy, check the copy worked, then do
your deletions.  But in the case of deleting a whole partition, it's
quicker not to go deleting files from it, but simply wipe the partition
in one go.

> or Q3. Is there a way with one of the CLI partitioners to merge the 
> individual partitions with the existing / partition?
> 
Probably.  I've done something similar with GUI tools, they're usually
just a front end to CLI tools.  Though, it *may* be easier to just
shrink down unwanted partitions, and not mount them, and expand other
partitions to fill the drive, rather than try to merge different
partitions into one.
> 
> PS is therre a way of searching 'man' pages to look for "a command
> that does 'x' "?

While reading a man file, hit the slash key, type in the keyword, then
hit enter.  If it's mentioned, it'll jump through to that part of the
man file.  To search for the same term again, just hit / then enter.

If you want to find the man pages for some particular keyword, then the
apropos command is what you want.  For example, and this is a safe
command for you to type in:  apropos format

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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