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I am new to LINUX I have a quick question...

I currently have three partitions:

/
swap
/home

I have a few related questions:

  1. Which partition does apt-get install applications to? (Windows equivalent "C:\Program Files" folder)

  2. If I reinstall Ubuntu, will my applications go away and I have to reinstall them, like in Windows?

  3. If I were to start from scratch and repartition, which partition should be the bigger partition (/ or /home?) if I am installing a lot programs from apt-get command

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    I think this needs an answer that explains the different strategies to avoid reinstalling everything.
    – don.joey
    Sep 24, 2013 at 11:30

2 Answers 2

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apt-get installs things wherever the packages say they want to be installed. This is typically somewhere in /usr and /lib.

Reinstalling can be done in a variety of methods. If you install over the top of an existing installation, you probably won't have to reinstall applications but you may have problems with dependencies. The reinstalled version of Ubuntu won't know that some things are already installed.

For that reason, a clean install is usually recommended, in which yes, you will need to reinstall your applications, just as you would with Windows.

I personally don't keep /home/ on a separate partition. This is more due to hardware (a small but stupidly fast SSD as my root partition and terabytes of slow RAID5) than anything else but I just keep the stuff I really want to keep (documents/music/etc) bind-mounted on the RAID5 array and then backup things I want running fast (firefox profile, etc) on a regular basis.

I don't think there's a single best answer for every user but if you need more disk space for applications, you need a bigger root partition. That much is pretty simple.

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  • Awesome thank you so much!!!! GOT IT!!! I am redoing my partition again soon so I am giving my root "/" more space :D
    – user195661
    Sep 24, 2013 at 21:16
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If you open the Ubuntu Software Center, there is a menu option for syncing. You could enable that and sync everything you have installed for easy installation later. For apps not in the Ubuntu repositories, you could save their .deb installer (or archive) to a folder synced to Ubuntu One.

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  • THANK YOU :D one stupid question were is .deb file located? and what is the command to backup it up to a desktop folder? THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!
    – user195661
    Sep 24, 2013 at 21:17

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