On Tue, 30 Dec 2003 23:10:40 -0600 (CST) Duane Attaway writes: > Do you have a disk, partition, or directory free that is large > enough? You can make a symbolic link of /opt somehwere > in the directory structure of a larger partition. Or you can > mount opt into its own partition with the mount command, > even using a whole disk. When you need space, call up > your friends ln -s and mount. They will help you move > your furniture around without you breaking a sweat. Someone from M$ wanted to know what made Linux great. Something which M$ will never do because it would require rewriting most of their filesystem, but which makes Linux great (especially relative to M$ Windows) is the lack of drive letters, coupled with ln -s. My wife wants a hard drive upgrade. I have a spare 20GB drive to put in there, but she has so many things which are installed on D: that installing it will be a royal pain. This is because the first Windows partition on the second hard drive is *always* given drive letter D:. No exceptions! So in order to add the second hard drive, I would have to create a 10GB partition on the 20GB hard drive (half its size) to match the current 10GB hard drive partition on the current hard drive which is drive D:. Then I would need to copy over the 9GB of files on the current drive D: partition. I would need to reboot her computer into KNOPPIX because M$ has decreed that some of the files on D: are system files which cannot be moved in Windows. I'm avoiding this for a little while because I have another Windows computer with a 5GB share on the network, and I have some of her files stored there to cover some of her needs. What is worse is that once I install this second drive, all of the drive letters move around. Suddenly, her DVDROM/CDROM drive is no longer drive I:. Suddenly, all her applications can't find the CDROM drive for the program CD. Suddenly, many things don't work anymore. Two solutions: if the application has a user-accessible config file, change the position of the CDROM drive in the config file; if the application does not have a user-accessible config file, *reinstall the application*. If she had been running Linux, I would have installed the new hard drive, partitioned and formatted it, and added an entry into /etc/fstab. THE END. No applications would have suddenly found their important files missing. No system files mysteriously located on drive H: when they used to be on drive D:, because there are no drive letters. Her CDROM drive would *still* located at /mnt/cdrom, not suddenly moving from I: to M:. Hours of work in Windows, versus less than an hour including the physical hard drive install in Linux. Secondly, ln -s. In M$ Windows, you can create "shortcuts". These allow you to open a file in an application, such as double-clicking on a shortcut to a M$ Word document. But they are very limited. Another application I have in Windows refuses to use the C:WINDOWSFONTS directory, so I have to have two copies of every font on my system to use that desktop publishing program. Windows shortcuts don't let you use the actual file the shortcut links to, so I can't create shortcuts in the DTP app directory linking to Fonts in the C:WINDOWSFONTS, because those are the shortcuts to the files and not treated the same as the files themselves. In Linux, symbolic links are essentially the same as M$ Windows shortcuts, but they are also treated the same as the files themselves. I can select a symbolic link to a file to open it in OpenOffice. I can't do the same thing with a shortcut in Windows, I have to know the actual location of the file rather than the location of the shortcut. And Linux can create symbolic links to directories as well, meaning that I can move /opt anywhere on the system. Or take an existing install which has /usr as its own partition, and use a symbolic link to move /usr/local onto its own partition. With Windows, the drive is the drive. You can't tell Drive D: to also be Drive H:. ________________________________________________________________ The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today!