My 6G partition for all of slack v11 was getting small, so I decided I'd try and move some big directory out to my vfat partition. I chose the kde subdir in /opt, which is c.1.5G.

First I tried "tar cf - .|(cd /new_kde_subdir; tar xf -)" but it gave me a bunch of warnings and errors, probably due to the copying of symlinks.

Then I tried cp -pR /opt/kde/* new_kde_subdir, and there were less warnings, in fact it was all about not being able to preserve ownership, but I didn't catch all of them.

In any case the "ln -s /opt/kde new_kde_subdir" does not do the job, because X complains about not being able to start kstartconfig nor kdeinit.

Is it because I've symlinked this directory onto a vfat partition? Is it because the tar and cp commands I've used are not the way to do it? I could have used dd, I suppose, but it'd be too slow though.

Any suggestions? Cheers.

vfat doesn't support symlinks.

i'd either grow the original partition with parted or reformat the vfat as ext2, mount it as /opt and reinstall kde.

EDIT: you can "mount" ext2 from nearly all operation system.

danke sehr für es mir erklaeren, erklaerbaer! ueber symlinks und vfat, wusste es nicht. Cheers!