How best to set up a separate /home partition, and pros/cons

[Liam Proven]

On 27 November 2012 07:02, John D. Herron <paradox.herron at bluewin.ch> wrote:
>
> 1)   Is the new /home partition best set up as a physical or logical
> partition? There are currently only two partitions on the HDD: the one that
> holds Ubuntu and a pre-installed 20 GB swap - see
> http://www.UploadScreenshot.com/image/1691496/758289

The "official" DOS was to partition a drive is:

1 primary
1 extended, and in that, multiple logical drives.

Subsequent/secondary drives should be all extended partitions only
with no primaries.

If you need to boot multiple OSs which can only boot from primary
partitions - e.g. Solaris, *BSD, Haiku - then have up to 3 primaries &
keep everything else inside logical drives inside the extended
partition.

You can only have 4 primaries per drive, total. The extended partition
/is/ one of those primaries, leaving you just 3 to play with. They are
a precious and very limited resource - do not squander them.

> 2)   I suppose I should somehow move the contents of the current /home dir
> to the new /home partition to be created and in time remove them from the
> distro's structure?

Kevin Gorman gave some good advice on this earlier in the thread.

> 4)   What is an 'access control list' and where is it to be found?

Um. I suggest you stay completely away from ACLs. There be dragons.



-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884