slackware book clarification

itsjustme · 05-18-2003, 10:09 AM

I found this in the Slackware Linux Essentials book for Slackware 8.0 that came with Slackware 9.0:

Quote:

We call the main directory the root directory, and it's denoted with a single slash (/). This concept may seem strange, but it actually makes life easy for you when you want to add more space. For example, let's say you run out of space on the drive that has /home on it. Most people install Slackware and make one big root drive. Well, since a partition can be mounted to any directory, you can simply go to the store and pick up a new hard drive and mount it to /home. You've now “grafted” on some more space to your system. And all without having to move many things around.

(Note: I am not doing this. I am just trying to understand it.)

I don't see how expanding /home with a new drive is accomplished with this 'grafting' they are talking about. Is there some symbolic link mechanism that appends the new 'space' to the /home directory?

thanks...

dorian33 · 05-18-2003, 11:43 AM

I does not append the new space. It replaces (when the new drive is mounted) the 'old' space with newly mounted one. Using described above /home capacity extension when you use 'mount /dev/hd... /home' you will see empty /home directory. But it will have a capacity of whole mounted drive. When you unmount this drive you'll see again the old content. So newly mounted drive is "covering" the old content.
So doing such 'capacity extension' you can rename /home to /old_home, create /home, mount new drive in /home copy /old_home to /home and finally remove /old_home.
This way you "extended" /home but also you got an additional free space which could be allocated when necessary inside the main drive directory tree belonging to the same partition.

itsjustme · 05-18-2003, 02:11 PM

Ok, that makes sense.

The info in this Slackware Linux Essentials book is quite terse and incites many more questions.

Thanks for the reply.

shellcode · 05-18-2003, 03:29 PM

question:

is the book basically the same thing as www.slackware.com/book
or is it a lot bigger and better?

itsjustme · 05-18-2003, 03:41 PM

That's the same book.

Only on CD3 it's one continuous html file named Slack8Book.html

I reckon it's just for getting started. Not much detail by design.

newlin · 06-30-2003, 03:12 PM

Is there a hard copy of this book available as the html format is ok if your at the pc and is there a pdf version anywhere ? so i can print it even ...!

Is there any other slackware book available or is this ithe only one ?

Can anyone recommend a alternative book for learning slack ware for a newbie ?

I have read oreillys bash book butt would like to find out more about running slackware itself ..