Re: New Ubuntu PC

[Graham Percival]

On Fri, Sep 09, 2011 at 05:37:03PM +0100, Phil Holmes wrote:
> I've got 2 disks in it - the main one is a standard SATA drive with
> the OS on it.  The other one is an 80 GByte SSD (solid state disk)
> that I bought with the intention of using as my data disk, so that
> compiles, etc., use the fastest disk there is.  My question is - how
> do I set up Ubuntu to use this as my data drive (presumably $HOME).
> I've read stuff about editing fstab, but wonder if this is the best
> way?  Any other pointers would be appreciated.

The easiest way is to set this up during the install.  When you
got to the "partitioning" screen and you presumably clicked on "do
it automatically for me", you missed the option.  :)

However, I'd suggest a slightly different setup: don't use your
SSD drive for your complete $HOME; instead, use it for things that
you specifically want on that drive.  I have a similar setup
(albeit just with disk partitions) on all my computers.

The relevant part of /etc/fstab is:
UUID=27b221e8-ad38-4811-97c4-aabf2cb7f5e4       /main   ext4
defaults,user,exec      0       0
(all one line)

and my $HOME directory contains this:
address@hidden:~$ ls -l
...
lrwxrwxrwx 1 gperciva gperciva       10 2011-08-28 12:41 src ->
/main/src/
...

so whenever I go to $HOME/src/ , I'll actually be in /main

You could easily have separate symlinks for $HOME/lilypond-git/
and any other software you wanted to compile quickly (maybe
$HOME/gub/ ?)


One advantage of this /main/ (or /compile/ or whatever you want to
call it) approach is that it's easy to set up that drive after
installing the main OS, so you won't need to reinstall.

Cheers,
- Graham