Arch Linux

blackout23

Member

Registered: 2011-11-16

Posts: 781

Installation without seperate /home partition [SOLVED]

Hello,

I searched the web to see if I could simply create 3 partitions /boot swap and the last one
for the filesystem and mount / and /home on /dev/sda3 trough fstab. I never found a
definitive answer.

Why do I want to do this? I never really felt that having / and /home seperated gave me an
advantage other than arbitrarily limiting my root partition even when there is still craploads of
free space on /home. I thought 8 GB would be enough for / until I installed Eclipse and Android SDK.
Clearing pacman cache did not help anymore and root was filled to the brim which resulted in poor
boot performance on SSD.

So how would one have to go on with this? I looked at LVM but I'm not sure how that will work
out with my SSD alignment and sounds a bit over-complicated when having root and home on
one ext4 partition would definitely solve my problem.

Thanks in advance,

blackout23

Last edited by blackout23 (2012-07-22 17:03:26)

vacant

Member

From: downstairs

Registered: 2004-11-05

Posts: 816

Re: Installation without seperate /home partition [SOLVED]

So how would one have to go on with this?

Install arch, specify just a "/" (root) partition and ignore warnings about not defining swap etc.

From your post, if you don't want a separate /home, then why have a separate /boot or /swap? You can always use a swap file should you need swap space.

Last edited by vacant (2012-07-21 09:01:54)

shulamy

Member

From: israel

Registered: 2010-09-11

Posts: 456

Re: Installation without seperate /home partition [SOLVED]

the advantage is that if you reinstal,l

you can keep the old home.

i'm happy i did it, for ihe reinstallation

after the /lib problrm.

ezjk

vacant

Member

From: downstairs

Registered: 2004-11-05

Posts: 816

Re: Installation without seperate /home partition [SOLVED]

the advantage is that if you reinstal,l

you can keep the old home.

Or install arch, tell the installer not to create a filesystem on /root but manually delete everything apart from /home directory, I assume that would work. Never tried it, maybe the installer would quit if it couldn't create the /home directory? If so just rename it first.

DSpider

Member

From: Romania

Registered: 2009-08-23

Posts: 2,273

Re: Installation without seperate /home partition [SOLVED]

This question has been asked before. Several times actually.

I don't have a separate /home and my system has been running great for about 3-4 years now (same i686 install I did on my old computer). I don't have a separate boot partition either, and because I have 2 GB RAM, I don't use swap - at all. My "/" is a 10.00 GB ext4 partition (which took several attempts to make 10.00 GB on the nose) and I'm doing just fine.

$ sudo ncdu / --exclude /media

    4.3GiB [##########] /usr
.   1.7GiB [###       ] /home
  274.3MiB [          ] /var
  208.7MiB [          ] /opt
   36.7MiB [          ] /boot
   15.7MiB [          ] /root
   11.3MiB [          ] /sbin
   10.0MiB [          ] /etc
    2.9MiB [          ] /bin
  220.0KiB [          ] /run
   72.0KiB [          ] /dev
   16.0KiB [          ] /srv
   12.0KiB [          ] /tmp
    8.0KiB [          ] /mnt
e   4.0KiB [          ] /lost+found
    0.0  B [          ] /proc
    0.0  B [          ] /sys
@   0.0  B [          ]  lib
<   0.0  B [          ] /media

 Total disk usage:   6.5GiB  Apparent size:   7.8GiB  Items: 317634

Depends what you install, I guess. For example, Wine installs to the user dir.

And a bigger "/" isn't recommended on a HDD; the read head would travel too much.

---

"How to Succeed with Linux"

I have made a personal commitment not to reply in topics that start with a lowercase letter. Proper grammar and punctuation is a sign of respect, and if you do not show any, you will NOT receive any help (at least not from me).

blackout23

Member

Registered: 2011-11-16

Posts: 781

Re: Installation without seperate /home partition [SOLVED]

So how would one have to go on with this?

Install arch, specify just a "/" (root) partition and ignore warnings about not defining swap etc.

From your post, if you don't want a separate /home, then why have a separate /boot or /swap? You can always use a swap file should you need swap space.

Thank you that helped a lot. I wasn't even aware that something like a swapfile exists. You learn something new everyday. And yet so simple to set up.

vacant

Member

From: downstairs

Registered: 2004-11-05

Posts: 816

Re: Installation without seperate /home partition [SOLVED]

Glad it helped