New OS Installation

[John_Rochard]

When I got a good deal on a 240 GB SSD, I decided to install this as yet another Linux OS to keep my OLD MS games separate from my “office work”.

Here in this image you can see I made 2 partitions on the new drive. The first partition is 50 GB for the new OS and the second is the remainder for the DOS and Windows games. Both are Extended File System 4, but you can use whatever you think is best.

When you install the new OS, many installers ask what you plan to do after detecting an existing OS. I choose “Something completely different…” option and install only the OS as the fat32 boot/efi should already exist on device sda1. Linux swap should also exist and trust me, it will find them. After setup is complete you will have a grub menu that asks you which OS to boot from with a few seconds or it decides for you.

Now with all my gaming software on the “Galaxy” partition, I won’t need to worry about reinstalling software should I need to reinstall the entire OS. This drive can run my gaming OS without interfering with business. All I did for Eve Online was move the EVE folder to the Galaxy partition. The new address is; /media/sysop/Galaxy/EVE

The media folder works well, once you set the volume to mount on boot by editing the /etc/fstab file adding the line;
UUID=d6fd3d2a-ed29-467b-b838-af325962fe4a /media/sysop/Galaxy auto auto,nofail 0 0

Your UUID will differ as it is call the universally unique identifier for good reason. You can find the UUID with Gparted application or using blkid command in the terminal.

With this setup, should I upgrade my OS or even change from Xubuntu to Manjaro, the games partition remains untouched. If you set Wine configuration up, it will even place the Wine virtual drive on the game partition as well.

Linux for the win! o7

[stefnia_Freir]

You can place the mount point on an existing path. Typically I mount the secondary partition on /home

This means that if I were to reinstall my OS, I would only need to specify the mount point and create the same user, then to reinstall the programs, to have the same config exactly, including my Eve accounts.

This also means that I can have several / partitions (one per OS) and still have only one /home to store my personal data.

What I made on a previous install, is that I had two additional drives in RAID (1? I think, the one that duplicates the data) which was for my important documents (typically work documents that were not saved somewhere else, or taxes etc. Also a lot of family pictures) and I made several mount bind int /etc/fstab to have the important documents on the RAID mapped in my $HOME . So it added a bit of security to my important documents.

[John_Rochard]

While I keep the /home partition alone during install, I have another drive partition sdb2 (not shown) containing a variety of documents. If need be, I normally replace the default home folders with symbolic links to those folders or copy the needed materials from the source. I have always been one never to keep all the eggs in the same basket. I also make use of the system restore utility “Timeshift” every 3 to 6 months or just before any major updates. Very important docs are archived on DVD. I should be good as long as the Earth retains its magnetic field. lol