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Hi guys! New to Arch, but must say its growing on me...Just a brief on my Linux history...early last year I installed FC1 but never did anything (logged on once). That was my "first" distro. Dec last year I installed SimplyMEPIS 2004 @ work on my work laptop (Compaq Armada E700). Fiddle around, used apt-get, started learning the linux ropes, struggles with wine and lotus notes etc. etc. However I got itchy feet and wanted to learn something a bit more about the linux OS config. So jumped in the deep end and installed Slack 10.1 over Mepis. Slack was great. So lean, and I figured out where most of the import conf files are, and compiled my first custom kernel (not as scary as I thought). I pretty much used unpacked tarballs for apps. Never played with swaret or anything. So then I hear about Arch on distrowatch. Slack/Crux inspired with an apt-like package messenger...so hear I am. So far, its all been great. Absolutely love being dropped into the conf files for editing. Didn't try the custom kernel on the fly - maybe next install.
So, anyway, where I am now is that I set aside a 700 M partition for /opt after realising kde would be installed in there. However I would like to install OOo2 beta, but there is no room. Is there a way to make pacman install to a particular directory (I have lots of space in /usr). Or else I will have to rebuild the box again with more space in /opt. Any suggestions ? QTparted won't work as I'm on XFS and there are these 0.3MB partitions in between each main partition.
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AFAIK no, because the way the arch package is packaged in a directory structure.
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Just installing OO to /usr is no long term solution as a lot of big packages are installed into /opt. I don't know how your partition layout is, so no idea how to best solve this. If possible I would merge the 700 Mb partition with the one before it, by making that one 700 Mb bigger (first the partition with cfdisk, then the filesystem with something like resizefs), because it's much more convienent to have a few big partitions instead of several tiny ones.
Assuming that you have a separate rootfs you can use the same partition for /opt and /usr by making /opt a symlink to e.g. /usr/opt. And if that doesn't work (because it's overwritten, or whatever) then doing something like "mount --bind /usr/opt /opt" at bootup should work.
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there's also the "-r" flag to pacman, which changes the installation root - I'd suggest against it (i3839's post is on the money), but it's workable if you want to *just* install OO - try:
pacman -r /usr -S open-office
NOTE: no clue if that's the package name...
this will install OO to /usr/opt/whatever
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`man pacman`:
-r, --root <path>
Specify alternative installation root (default is "/"). This
should not be used as a way to install software into e.g.
/usr/local instead of /usr. Instead this should be used if you
want to install a package on a temporary mounted partition,
which is "owned" by another system. By using this option you not
only specify where the software should be installed, but you
also specify which package database to use.
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Thanks guys
i3839, I took your advice and created /opt as a symlink to /usr/opt, and all is well
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