When you install Kubuntu and choose the "use the whole drive" option when partitioning the drive you lose out on one of the best features of Linux in my opinion! It will partition and format your drive without any involvement from the user which is nice, but it creates one partition containing both the root file system and the user's home directory, which is the problem. I don't understand why they do this.
Why is this a problem you may ask. You have to copy all you important data and settings if you reinstall Kubuntu clean or switch to another distro. If an upgrade fails you will have to remember to copy your data if you chose to install clean and this will most likely have to be done from the command prompt. It's much nicer booting to find your home space the way it was before you installed with all your e-mail settings, etc. It even nicer knowing you don't really have to worry about your data no matter what. You can also mount home on other machines to access your personal files without having to mount the whole drive and it is a clear separation of system stuff from users stuff. My advice is for a new install of Kubuntu to be manually partitioned. It really isn't hard and there is plenty of help on the net. Let's say you have a standard 80gb EIDE hard drive on the primary controller as master, this will be hda or sda. When you install Kubuntu rather than letting it create everything for you select manual when you get to the disk creation. Create / (root) giving it about 8gb, then create SWAP giving it about 1gb, and finally HOME. Give HOME the remaining drive space. The next screen will ask what you want to format, select your new partitions for use, but ONLY FORMAT / (root) and complete the install. Now if you switch Linux or do a clean upgrade all you have to do is reformat / (root) leaving swap and HOME alone. I don't want to go into all the different configurations you may run into, but if you have Windows on the same drive or on the primary disk with a blank secondary drive and wish to install Linux on a second partition or slave drive you should read up on that here . If you have old partitions where you want to install Linux, say Windows NTFS, you will need to delete it before creating the new Linux partitions. Just be careful not to remove any partition you want to keep, because these will not be recoverable once they are created. If you have Kubuntu or Ubuntu installed and want to move HOME to it's own partition read this . |
