Hello,

I've run out of space on my boot disk and so I have added 1TB of portable storage. How can I install KDE on this portable storage ?

Thanks

Weasel

That'll depend on the package manager used to do the installation.

Apparently, apt packages have the target directory built into the package.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/404824/how-to-choose-install-location-using-apt-get-install

RPM appears to allow you to specify the target directory for a package, but I've never tried this.
https://www.thegeekdiary.com/how-to-install-an-rpm-package-into-a-different-directory-in-centos-rhel-fedora/

On FreeBSD, where ports allows you to build from source, kde will go into /usr/local. In your environment, /usr/local would be mounted from you new shiny 1TB drive.

You can move large directories to your 1TB drive and symlink to it. This link may (or may not) be helpful.
https://www.cplusplus.com/forum/unices/280636/#msg1213558

Read up about LVM - Logical Volume Manager.

It allows one to add extra drives to it, while it is still seen by the user as one contiguous amount of space.

You may already have it, just a case of configuring it.

This is better than have 2 systems, IMO

This is better than have 2 systems ...

Unless one fails.

Unless one fails.

If a drive fails the results would be similar, would they not? A disaster either way, unless one has RAID.

Mounting another drive and providing a symlink to it is a good idea - better than duplicating the OS.

If filesystem is on (non-redundant) disk(s) that break, then some/all of that filesystem is missing. Say, filesystem spans two disks and one breaks. Which parts are in the intact disk? Can you (trivially) read anything from it?

Compare that to having separate filesystem in each disk. The intact disk will still have consistent and complete filesystem with whatever files are in it. Only the content of the broken disk is lost.


One does not need symlink, if one mounts to correct point. For example, we know that we will have a large webpage. That data would be under /var/www.

We could just mount a second filesystem (i.e. disk) somewhere and reconfigure the HTTP-server to use that new path instead of /var/www.

We could mount somewhere and replace /var/www with a symlink to new path.

In these HTTP-server config and or AppArmor/SELinux has to be tweaked.

Or, mount new filesystem directly as /var/www.

I actually would mount elsewhere, create subdir for www content and then bind-mount that subdirectory as /var/www.

I would be very careful about installing OS components (like KDE) on a portable storage device unless you can insure that that "portable storage device" is always properly connected when booting the computer.