Having a /home partition: Priceless!
For the longest time, I wasn’t a big fan of creating a /home partition on my Linux installs. I figured, why bother? But when I made the switchover to Ubuntu from Gentoo, I decided to go ahead and make a separate home partition on my desktop, and let me say I’m glad I did so. Yesterday I managed to screw up my Ubuntu install by forcing an upgrade. Herein lies why the developers warn against using a pre-release… things tend to break. Originally, I was going to try to save the install, but after thinking about everything I had installed over the course of the past few months, I figured a fresh install of Gutsy would be in order.
During the installation, I performed partitioning manually so I could insure my home partition (which is actually a separate 250GB drive) would not get wiped out. Once partitioning was completed, the installation moved on without a hitch, and I’m back up and running. The beauty of all of this is that I didn’t lose any data or custom configuration options. All I had to do was reinstall the software I used and I was back in business. I had all of my Firefox settings and bookmarks, my Fluxbox settings, my scripts and my data, all back and ready to go. Obviously, this is not a substitution to regular backups, but in the event that you would need to reinstall, a home partition will save you some work.
Additionally, I decided to start using KDE again. Why? I wanted a switch, and KDE has a special place in my geeky heart. I figured I’d go with it for a while and see what happens. It’s pretty snappy, and right now I’m not really missing Fluxbox. I’m also pretty tempted to try to install KDE 4 and play with it, but I might save that for a later time.
