Reorganising F11 partitions - how to?

[DB]

On 11/27/2009 07:00 AM, Tim wrote:
> 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
>
>    
Thanks, Tim!  Let's see what sort of a mess I can make ;-}} .  When push 
comes to shove, I can always start from scratch as my desktop is still 
running F11 correctly.

Dave