New to Lubuntu, question about docx and increasing size of things

[Impavidus]

edit, last thing that puzzles me, sorry. On some websites, under the linux installer section for a program, there are two ways, generic linux and ubuntu. Lubuntu is still Ubuntu, even if it is using another environment?

An installer for Ubuntu typically means that they offer a .deb file that integrates nicely with the official Ubuntu repositories. Lubuntu uses the official Ubuntu repositories, so that should work. It may even work on other distros that use .debs.

Similarly, in the Muon package manager, categories are like desktop GNOME, desktop Gnustep, desktop Xfce. Is all of that Lubuntu compatible? Sorry if it is the dumbest question you ever read....

Most of it is compatible with Lubuntu. Maybe even all. But it may result duplicate applications and libraries, so it may not be very efficient use of your hard drive and memory. If some package is truly incompatible with Lubuntu, the package manager will tell you it has to remove lubuntu-desktop or something like that to satisfy dependencies.

[hrafnagudh]

Well....let's say I will learn how to do the backup code thing.
About muon, I'm struggling finding anything online about it, my biggest question is, how do I choose where to install the stuff (I have a partition made for programs and staff, the partition for lubuntu is not very big, and I wish to use it just for the os to avoid complications)? There is a link to muon manual but redirects me to a page that says muon doesn't exist...

[Dennis N]

Well....let's say I will learn how to do the backup code thing.
About muon, I'm struggling finding anything online about it, my biggest question is, how do I choose where to install the stuff (I have a partition made for programs and staff, the partition for lubuntu is not very big, and I wish to use it just for the os to avoid complications)? There is a link to muon manual but redirects me to a page that says muon doesn't exist...

The application packages (called .deb packages) you get through muon contain information on where to put the various files in the package. It's all automatic. You don't get to choose where to install.

[Impavidus]

How big is your not-very-big Lubuntu partition? If it's at least 20GB, that should be enough for OS plus applications. A separate partition for applications complicates matters, so don't. Anyway, there isn't a clear distinction between OS, tools and applications.

If you've got an application that needs a huge load of data, there are ways to move that data to a separate partition.

[GhX6GZMB]

The application packages (called .deb packages) you get through muon contain information on where to put the various files in the package. It's all automatic. You don't get to choose where to install.

^^^ This.

DON'T fiddle with where programs and associated files are located, leave this up to Muon, sudo apt-get install and your PPAs. Otherwise you'll have to do a complete reinstall very soon (ask me how I know, I was in your position about a year ago...).

The only thing you can do is think about how your $HOME directory structure should be set up, everything else is predefined and automatic.

How big is your not-very-big Lubuntu partition? If it's at least 20GB, that should be enough for OS plus applications

That's also what I thought until I started playing with CAD programs. I had to increase my / partition to 30 GB. But that's more of an exception, I guess.

Concerning backups: you actually need two:
One for backing up all your system setups and configurations.
A second one for backing up your stuff in your /home directory structure.

Why two? Well if you combine them because you've done some "optimizing" of your system that failed (this will happen a lot until you've used Linux for 30+ years) and do a restore, your /home directory will also be overwritten, including your latest documents.

For the system backup I recommend Timeshift (available in Muon). It's a GUI backup system based on rsync, which means it makes incremental backups (only changes are backed up). With Timeshift you can always do a rollback to a previous system state, which gives peace-of-mind when experimenting. By default it excludes /home and /root from backups, which is as it should be.

For document backups for /home and /root look around. there are plenty of programs available.


Last, here's a nice link to understand the Linux directory structure:
https://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/09...tem-structure/

[hrafnagudh]

It is 130 gb, but I'm thinking about the risk of installing too much of everything in the future...
Well, guys, thanks all for the help. I will start with Timeshift for the backup, and then look for the others
Have a nice day all!

[Impavidus]

Many laptop/desktop users (like me) only backup their home directory (skipping things like cache and compiled stuff). I haven't customised my system a lot, so if it breaks and I can't fix it (never really happened to me, but I'm the type who learns by reading, not by falling), I just reinstall. As you never log in as root, /root (=root's home directory) is mostly empty.

[TheFu]

It is 130 gb, but I'm thinking about the risk of installing too much of everything in the future...
Well, guys, thanks all for the help. I will start with Timeshift for the backup, and then look for the others
Have a nice day all!

130GB!!!

The OS should easily fit in 25G.

HOME directories can be an size needed, but I think of that as only stuff I created, that isn't media files, so it is hard imagine that to be larger than 25G. Then the "big stuff" gets placed elsewhere, not on any desktop system, but on network storage that appears to be local storage ... but isn't.

For a desktop, I'll usually setup storage in this way:

$ dft  # df -hT with uninteresting loop/etc removed
Filesystem                      Type  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2                       ext2  721M  185M  500M  27% /boot
/dev/sda1                       vfat  511M  3.7M  508M   1% /boot/efi
/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root     ext4   25G   12G   12G  52% / 
/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-home--lv ext4   74G   21G   51G  29% /home 
/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-stuff    ext4   99G  367M   93G   1% /stuff

Don't worry too much about the left column. I use LVM as a volume manager. Think of those as extremely flexible partitions. For now, that's close enough for the root, home and stuff logical volumes. /boot and /boot/efi are just standard partitions.

• /boot 700+MB for kernels
• /boot/efi 500MB or much less for EFI boot stuff (FAT32)
• / 25GB to hold the OS, applications, system settings
• /home 25Gx{number of users} Whatever is needed, but usually 20G is enough for each userid.
• /stuff Storage not created by a human. Think areas for game data, media, and other large files.
• swap 4.1G on every desktop system. I have many reasons, but mainly because less swap on a desktop without 16G+ of RAM will lead to crashes and unexplained lockups. That's been my experience.

Where things are places isn't really all that important, because we can easily move it around or if using LVM, add more storage to existing mounts, or just create a symbolic link from where we want the files to appear ---> where the files actually are.

For example, say I keep a 4th copy of some Music in /stuff/Music and want to access it from /home/thefu/Music. That's trivial.
ln -s /stuff/Music ~/ is the command. Best of all, my backup tool knows to save the symlink, but not follow it, so I don't get a 5th copy of Music in the backups. MS-Windows tried to do something like this with "Libraries", but those were only dotNET-GUI capable. The NTFS file system didn't have those capabilities so anyone not using the GUI didn't have "Libraries" which merged locations. I understand that MSFT fix that a few years ago in NTFS by adding the idea of symbolic links. Unix has had them and used them widely for 40+ yrs.

I won't pretend that my list of storage above is THE only way to do it. There are times when I need to make /var/ a separate mount to hold a DBMS or virtual machines, so I'll create storage for that and mount it where it is needed. Storage needs to be flexible.

Why bother with all this? It makes backups cleaner. Backing up the OS is different from backing up user files. Some files don't need to be backed up, so I keep those in places that are different too. Nobody needs 50 exact copies of the same files in their backups, but we do want 50 versions that can be easily restored if the files change slightly over time.

[hrafnagudh]

130GB!!!

The OS should easily fit in 25G.

I know but I wanted to be sure
I almost understood the soft-hard links thing, and learning how to stop worrying and to love the terminal commands

[TheFu]

I know but I wanted to be sure
I almost understood the soft-hard links thing, and learning how to stop worrying and to love the terminal commands

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link I haven't used a hard-link in about a year. I use symlinks weekly - aka soft-links or symbolic links. But often, there are other methods to make accessing directories and files quick like the cdpath or shell aliases.

As for CLI commands (actually, don't need a terminal to run them), we use them here since

• Lots of different GUIs are available, each slightly different
• No need to post 20 huge images to explain something 1 copy/paste CLI command will do
• CLI commands work on "Servers", which don't have any GUI.
• CLI commands work over network connections like ssh, which usually doesn't have any GUI.
• CLI commands seldom change, whereas the GUIs seem to completely change every 3 yrs for no good reason. I'm using the same CLI commands today for end-user stuff that I used in 1993. Master the CLI and you'll find a GUI bloated and slow for about 98% of what you need.
• CLI stuff is always available. A GUI may not be.
• Usually, a GUI provides only 20% of the capabilities compared to the CLI interface.
• It is much harder to automate any GUI than every CLI command. I can schedule a program to do work for me, daily, and have that work waiting for my review 1000x easier than using a GUI.

Once you learn some tricks of your chosen shell, probably bash, you'll discover that you don't really type much at all. Bash has command completion, so I only need type 2-3 characters + {tab} to have what I want filled in, correctly. Only valid directories, valid filenames, and valid options are possible ... no more typos. Basically, almost every command has a built-in little helper to ensure I cannot ask for the wrong answers. Of course, on very minimal systems, tab-completion isn't enabled, so I make the same mistakes that a beginner would there ... until I load the tab-completion package (if I can).

These will get you started:

• https://github.com/jlevy/the-art-of-command-line
• http://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php