Upgrade from 8.04 to 10.04 LTS (BORKED)

[Liam Proven]

On 13 September 2010 01:48, Derek Maciel <ishidableach at gmail.com> wrote:

Please bottom-quote on this list (& all other mailing lists). It makes
following threads of conversation doable, which top-quoting breaks.

> I've seen people create a seperate partition for /home but I never
> really knew why. The way you explain it wants me to install Ubuntu
> again and try it out ^.^

It's not hard. In use, it makes no real difference. It makes
wipe-and-reload upgrade *much* easier & you can also readily share
your home directory among several different distros, or among
different versions of the same distro.

> If I have my / partition formatted as ext4, can I make my /home
> partition as something else? That way I can access /home in Windows
> XP.

You can, in theory, but I would not recommend it at all.

E.g. some Unix tools won't work on non-Unix filesystems - such as
anything using the Maildir format for email storage, which uses
filenames illegal on NTFS or FAT.

Secondly, with a non-Unix filesystem, you can't apply Linux security
settings to anything in your home directory.

I just have a big FAT32 volume for sharing stuff between Windows &
Linux. It is quite hard to move XP's "\Documents and Settings" tree to
another drive - it can be done but AFAIK only by serious hacking of
the install CD, in a very unsupported way - but it's trivially easy to
move the location of "My Documents" and I just do that. If you have a
single user, this is simple & fairly effective.

-- 
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