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I know you can do this on Windows (which is helpful since I have a small OS partition) but is it possible to do this on Linux?

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  • Do you mean from source or using a package manager? Jan 24, 2013 at 22:56

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If you want all of your software to be installed on a different partition automatically, the easyest way would be a partition containing the content of /usr. This way, nearly every big file being installed with software is put on the separate partition. When doing this, your system won't start properly if the partition can't be mounted on boot, but all the important tools for rescue should be in /bin and /sbin, so this should be fine.

For doing this you have to boot from a livecd and copy the whole content of the /usr directory to the other partition and then edit /etc/fstab of your system to contain the line:

UUID=InsertYourUUIDhere    /usr    FileSystemType  MountOptions

Replace "InsertYourUUIDhere" by the UUID of the partition (you get it by using the command "blkid"). Replace "FileSystemType" by the filesystem type of the partition and replace "MountOptions" by the mount options found in the line with your root filesystem (/).

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Of course it's possible.

At its most basic, this could consist of nothing more than creating an appropriate directory (/bin, say) on the desired volume, adding this to your environment's $PATH variable, and then putting some binary executables in there.

If you're using one of the package managers which puts all its binaries in a special place (like the /opt directory) you can always modify your fstab so that your external volume (or a partition on it) mounts to /opt, which means that /opt is now magically on your external volume: How to edit and understand fstab

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  • I understand that would work if I had "portable" binary files (like ones I've built from source) but what about when using apt-get or yum? Do these not install to already defined default directories? :)
    – Geesh_SO
    Jan 24, 2013 at 23:12
  • They do. Usually, the directory structure of the package manager is carefully controlled so as to help managing dependencies etc. It's not the sort of thing that can be straightforwardly answered in the general case. In the case of apt-get, I'm fairly certain that it pretty much requires everything to be in an expected place. Jan 25, 2013 at 3:15
  • In many/most cases you may be able to move the compiled binaries to your external volume and then use the package manager to clean up the build files/dependencies etc. Jan 25, 2013 at 3:22
  • If you're using one of the package managers which puts all its binaries in a special place (like the /opt directory) you can always modify your fstab so that your external volume (or a partition on it) mounts to /opt, which means that /opt is now magically on your external volume. This is probably your best bet. Jan 25, 2013 at 3:24

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