confusion of space allocation /home and /HOME

Question

I recently got a new W8 computer and followed this tutorial to get Ubuntu installed in dual boot. This is what my file system looks like:

Device        Directory      Total
/dev/sda6     /               45GBiB
/dev/sda2     /boot/efi       356MiB
/dev/sda7     /HOME           874.3GiB

Now, I was going about my data science stuff and downloaded a 12GB file, and un-zipped it. I start getting errors saying that I do not have enough memory. I know I have ~1TB allocated to Linux. All I can tell is that I was working in /Home/myusername assuming that that's where most of my space was allocated, but it seems as though ~800GB are in /HOME. Since I'm new to Linux I'm a little confused. Any ideas on how to go about this? Should I just start using /HOME or is there a proper way to reallocate space?

Answer 1

The default Linux file system is case sensitive. You have defined a mountpoint at /HOME when instead, you should have used /home. Therefore, the /HOME is simply not used, it is not your actual home directory, that is in /home/username which is completely separate from /HOME.

To fix this and use the 874G partition you have created as your actual home directory (in the Linux world, your home dir is referred to as $HOME (note the $) or ~/), you will need to follow these steps:

1. Create your home directory on /HOME:

   sudo mkdir "/HOME/$USER"
   sudo chown username "/HOME/$USER"
   

2. Copy everything from your current $HOME to this new directory.

   mv ~/* ~/.* "/HOME/$USER"
   

3. Tell the system to mount the partition of /HOME in the right place, /home. For this, you will need to edit /etc/fstab:

   sudo gedit /etc/fstab
   

   That will bring up an editor window, you need to find the line that mounts /HOME, it will look something like this:

   UUID=123-ABC    /HOME   ext4    rw,errors=remount-ro    0   0
   

   Change /HOME to /home, leave everything else as it is.

4. Remove your home dir and reboot

   sudo rmdir "/home/$USER"
   sudo reboot