Moving from F30 XFCE to SB but keeping /home on the same disk

Project Discussion
1

People,

I have now installed SB on both my laptop and my workstation but I have been having a few issues:

  • During a reinstall I usually do a custom partitioning and I keep my previous /home partition and just remount it after the install has finished.
  • I don’t know the best way of dealing with the SB /var/home setup . . I have been renaming dirs and creating new symlinks etc but it seems clumsy . .

Are there suggestions about a preferred way of proceeding - there must be a way of doing what I want cleanly and easily without having to copy TB of data about?

Thanks,

2
  • IIRC you can still set /home as a custom partition and it’ll still work normally on Silverblue.
  • Hmm, could you be more specific another issues with /var/home? It should be symlinked onto /home so you won’t really need any special magic.
3

OK, I will see how I go doing that.

I was renaming the original dirs, creating replacements for /usr/local , /var/usrlocal , /var/home etc and I started getting problems with layering not finishing - I don’t have the error message that I searched for in the browser now because I reinstalled SB - I had done:

rpm-ostree install vim-X11

and rebooted but when I checked the status after it had rebooted there was a message that the previous exercise did not finish properly . . sorry I didn’t keep the error message - I should have done it on my phone or something . .

Anyway, I thought the messing around with renaming dirs and symlinking etc might have caused the problem somehow . .

After reinstalling just now and not doing any dir renaming or symlinking, the vim-X11 install worked fine . .

4

I realise I don’t understand what you meant here - I booted in single-user mode but still couldn’t remove the /home symlink - did you mean for me to do:

mv /var/home /var/home.sb
mkdir /var/home
mount /dev/sda5 /var/home

? - that’s what I was doing before . . then I have issues with none of the Gnome stuff being available in the old XFCE /home/phr dir but I should be able to rsync that over from the new SB phr user?

Thanks,
Phil.

5

Ohhh dang, yeah SB creates the proper symlinks and such anyway. I can see this tripping things up a bit…

Sorry, I meant setting it during installation.

6

Right - I might be forced to another install (see my other PA post) but I will try and fix this second install manually first.

7

Okay, so update (I wanted to say this before but had to check myself first): any partition you mount to /home in your fstab will automatically become /var/home in the booted system with the /home symlink set up. So, you can just mount the drive to /home like you normally would, and everything should work.

8

@refi64

However I wanted to keep the home dir of the user during testing separate from the actual old /home partition so I rename /var/home to /var/home.sb, create a new /var/home and mount /dev/sda5 to there - then I can inspect the SB user dir if I ever need to and prob eventually delete it.

9

Ah, you have a testing and normal home partition? Must’ve missed that before… What do you do with the separation?

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I just meant I was exploring SB and I wanted to keep the test user dir pristine SB so that if later, once I went back to my live user, if there were any issues with the way SB was behaving, I could do a DirDiff in Vim and see what was different in any of the user config files etc - just being OCD and expecting something to break - I will probably delete /var/home/phr.sb once I am comfortable everything is going fine . .

1 Like
11

Ah, I don’t believe Silverblue really does anything with user config files (though as a person who has accidentally wiped drives before I understand the paranoia).

12

Ha! Yes, so far my mounted /dev/sda5 old home partition for user “phr” is almost 100% - there are some odd path and other minor things which I will post about separately but nothing to do with conf files so far.