where software is installed

[bytefyre]

Hello, I have installed Mint (8, gnome) with a very small root partition (unfortunately my bios can't see my new hard drive, which is where it is installed) so I only have 249 megabytes of space in root, (before I had around 31 megabytes but I removed open-office,org) my problem is that now I only have 249 MB of space to install programs, therefore I was wondering if there is a way to install all the applications in my home partition, which has plenty of space

[piratesmack]

How is your hard drive partitioned?

It would probably be best to shrink your home partition and create a new partition for /usr (That's where software is usually installed)

[Midnighter]

How big is your available drive, and how big are the partitions you created?

[bytefyre]

my home partition is more than big enough, I've made another partition (40 GB) for /usr, but how do I make Linux install stuff in there?

[piratesmack]

Alright, this requires a little work from the Terminal
You should do this from the live cd and NOT your running system.

I don't recommend trying this if you are new to Linux unless you don't care about losing data.

Mount your partitions:

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sudo mkdir -p /mnt/root
sudo mkdir -p /mnt/usr
sudo mount /dev/ROOT /mnt/root
sudo mount /dev/USR /mnt/usr

Of course, replace '/dev/ROOT' and '/dev/USR' with your partitions.
You should be able to figure this out by running 'fdisk -l'

Copy everything from /mnt/root/usr to your new partition:

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sudo cp -av /mnt/root/usr/* /mnt/usr

Once everything is copied to the new partition, you can delete the data on the old one:

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sudo rm -rf /mnt/root/usr/*

Note: I didn't remove the /usr folder, we still need that.

Now edit /etc/fstab:

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gksu gedit /mnt/root/etc/fstab

Add something like this:

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/dev/USR /usr ext4 defaults 1 2

Again, replace '/dev/USR' with your partition and also replace 'ext4' with the filesystem you use.

Now you can unmount your partitions and reboot:

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sudo umount /mnt/root
sudo umount /mnt/usr

Now your partition will be mounted on /usr and software will be installed there.

[bytefyre]

thanks piratesmack, it worked