SBLinux.org

I'm not sure this is specific to Mepis but that's what I mostly use so I'll ask here.

I have a partition set-up following Silverbear's suggested approach with a small home partition and a larger partition that I use for data storage for both the Mepis install and a combined root -home partition i use for playing with other distros. The benefits are as described on this site but I do run into some aggravations for which someone more knowledgeable may have a solution or work-around.

First most save dialog boxes do not show symlinks and do not allow direct saving to the data partition so it becomes a two-step process instead of one. Second, some apps, notably Amarok, apparently do not allow accessing other partitions for playlist building etc. I can open ogg files with Amarok provided I start by right clicking the file and selecting open with but I can't find a way to do it the other way around. Similarly some KDE functions such as setting wallpaper from with Konqueror do not appear to work if the file is being pulled from another partition besides home. K9copy also appears to save only to Home.

I would like to use the data partition as transparently as possible so any advice on how to work around any of the above would be really appreciated. Thanks

Hi, kgator.

Those are substantial problems.
If I experienced them, I wouldn't advocate the use of symlinks for data. . . but I don't seem to have any of those problems. Except for Amarok, which I don't much use, I'd have to say that my experience using symbolic links on Mepis is the exact opposite:

• I save all my usual documents to a subdirectory sorted by document purpose within the directory /home/silverbear/01-files
  /home/silverbear/01-files is a symbolic link from /mnt/sda5, where 10.5 GB of such files reside, safely out of the physical partition mounted as /home
• My wallpaper in KDE is pulled from my /home/silverbear/04-pix directory --which is symlinked from /mnt/sdc1/pix

Multimedia files can be symlinked
I have /mnt/sdb2 and /mnt/sdb3 symlinked as /home/silverbear/music-01 and /home/silverbear/music-02.
I can go into the Kaffeine menu, choose "open directory" and navigate thru the symlink in my /home/silverbear to the actual subdirectories of /mnt/sdb2 [music-01] where everything is arranged by artist, then album. We listened to Chris Isaak's Christmas album that way a lot last month!

Symlinking the entire /home/user directory into the root partition
That described how I do it in Mepis 8 and Pardus. Actually, I have an even more symlinked situation than that in Mepis 7. the entire /home/silverbear directory is a symbolic link from /mnt/sda6, where I have a partition just for home directories. /mnt/sda6/archhome gets symlined to appear as /home/silverbear in my Arch root directory, and /mnt/sda6/mep7home gets symlinked to the Mepis 7 root partition directory /home/silverbear. That way there is no need to mount a separate partition in /etc/fstab. It's not necessarily better -- both methods keep /home/silverbear config files safely off the root partition. But it shows that when correctly designed, you can symlink any file anywhere on you system and it will work.

The Mepis Linux OS runs on symlinks
The majority of system files are where they appear to be. But some are links, like:
/sbin/ip is a symlink from /bin/
/proc/ControlPanel is symlinked from /etc/alternatives/ControlPanel
/dev/fd is symlinked from /proc/self/fd
/dev/cdrom and /dev/cdrw are both symlined from the one file /dev/scd0

And many more examples --these taken from Mepis 7.0, BTW.

Let's examine your situation
Maybe you are having a permissions problem. Can you give me some command outputs so I can look at the situation for you? If you want to post them, that would be great, but if you'd rather not, email them to me and I'll answer you privately, while giving the forum the gist of the problem/fix we come up with.

First command, in Konsole:

Code: Select all

ls -l ~

Please cut and paste the entire output --that should give us the listing in long format of every visible file in your /home/user directory, including the symbolic links and wherefrom they are linked.

Then go to the /mnt/sd* partition that each of those symbolic links hook up to. For example, in my "music-01" example, I'd then need to give the command:

Code: Select all

ls -l /mnt/sdb2

This will show me the "real" directory and the permissions on those files.

Last questions for now:
1] Does anyone else log onto this computer but you? In Mepis, I mean. Other OS's don't matter.
2] Are these data files, multimedia files, etc written on a linux-format partion [ext3, reiserfs, etc], or on a Microsoft-format partition [fat32, vfat,ntfs]?


all the best,
SilverBear

Sorry about the delayed response. I've been out of pocket for a few days. Below is the list for ls -l ~.

Home folder

drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 4096 2008-12-29 00:29 Backups
drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 4096 2009-01-09 02:02 brother_files
drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 4096 2008-12-26 00:28 Desktop
drwxr-xr-x 4 kin users 4096 2009-01-24 19:58 Documents
drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 4096 2009-01-24 20:22 dwhelper
drwxr-xr-x 6 kin users 4096 2008-12-26 03:20 gle4
drwxr-xr-x 8 kin users 4096 2006-11-08 15:27 Mail
drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 4096 2009-01-24 20:02 movies
drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 4096 2004-03-14 15:44 Music
drwxr-xr-x 3 kin users 4096 2004-05-24 17:24 News
drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 4096 2009-01-19 16:46 OperaDownloads
drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 4096 2004-03-12 20:33 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 4096 2003-09-04 03:06 Shared
-rw-r--r-- 1 kin users 112 2008-12-27 00:18 software_1
-rw-r--r-- 1 kin users 108 2008-12-27 00:18 videos-1
drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 4096 2009-01-24 20:28 Wallpapers
-rw-r--r-- 1 kin users 116 2009-01-24 20:07 Wallpapers-1
drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 12288 2008-12-27 00:51 Wallpapers-copy

Linked partition list

drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 4096 2009-01-19 13:32 Backups
drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 4096 2008-04-27 17:40 bin
drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 4096 2008-12-05 08:29 conky_files
drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 12288 2009-01-19 13:33 DEBS
drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 4096 2008-10-19 14:58 Desktop
drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 4096 2008-08-31 00:52 Display_files
drwxr-xr-x 6 kin users 4096 2009-01-24 20:52 Documents
drwxr-xr-x 30 kin users 12288 2009-01-19 13:45 Documents1
drwxr-xr-x 3 kin users 4096 2007-12-30 00:50 dosgames
drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 4096 2009-01-24 20:03 dwhelper
drwxr-xr-x 3 kin users 4096 2008-07-16 01:43 flac
drwxr-xr-x 13 kin users 4096 2007-10-01 23:34 icons
drwxr-xr-x 24 kin users 4096 2008-11-22 02:07 lweather
drwxr-xr-x 12 kin users 4096 2008-06-15 23:30 Mail
drwxr-xr-x 5 kin users 4096 2009-01-19 16:51 Movies
drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 4096 2009-01-19 16:16 Music
drwxr-xr-x 3 kin users 4096 2004-05-24 17:24 News
drwxr-xr-x 73 kin users 4096 2008-11-02 22:40 ogg
drwxr-xr-x 5 kin users 4096 2008-09-30 15:19 OOO300_m9_native_packed-1_en-US.9358
drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 4096 2008-12-29 00:39 OperaDownloads
drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 4096 2009-01-24 20:53 pictures
drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 4096 2008-08-02 20:28 Public
drwxr-xr-x 3 kin users 4096 2008-12-13 16:02 Shared
drwxr-xr-x 30 kin users 16384 2009-01-24 20:52 software
drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 4096 2009-01-19 16:41 temp
drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 4096 2008-08-02 20:28 Templates
drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 4096 2008-12-29 00:26 Videos
drwxr-xr-x 2 kin users 12288 2009-01-24 20:53 Wallpapers

As to the last questions, two other people use this computer occasionally with little need for storage so neither home directory has any synlinks to the data storage partition. All partitions in question are ext3.

I was able to work out the problem with Amarok but not using symlinks.

Thanks for the help.