how to expand space for more softwares

[Nils Kassube]

Tapas Mishra wrote:
> I keep installing various softwares on my Ubuntu desktop.Right now I
> am stuck up with space problem.
> I have some partitions which are being used by other OS but they have
> plenty of space free.

What filesystems are on the partitions?

> It is mountable/read/write happens.
> I am not clear if I have to expand space for more installations then
> /opt
> /usr or /lib or /etc which directory and how should I go ahead to
> give them more space.

I don't have a real solution for you but here are some thoughts:

If you want to install more packages from the Ubuntu repositories, you 
will need more space mainly in /usr and /var. But new packages usually 
want to put their binaries in existing directories, so you can't easily 
mount a new partition at e.g. /usr because then the existing files would 
be hidden. And that partition should be a filesystem which supports 
Linux (Unix) permissions, i.e. no FAT32 or NTFS.

If your new packages are compiled from source, you could install them in 
/opt or /usr/local and use that directory as the mount point for the 
other partition. But whatever you do, make sure that the newly created 
directories don't interfere with the existing other OS. As an example 
for possible problems, lets assume your other OS is some other Linux 
distribution. Then there is a directory /bin on that partition and if 
you now mount the partition at /usr/local, newly compiled packages would 
put their binary executables in /usr/local/bin which would clutter the 
/bin directory for the other OS. Furthermore your shell programs would 
now possibly load executable files from /usr/local/bin instead of /bin 
if the absolute path is not given and your $PATH has /usr/local/bin 
listed before /bin. Those programs may not be compatible with the 
libraries on your Ubuntu system and you could have some difficulty 
troubleshooting.

I think your best option would be to put your /home directory on that 
other partition and mount that partition at /home. But again you would 
have to move the existing data to that other partition and it should 
support Linux permissions.


Nils