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I have a Dell Inspiron Mini 10 netbook running Windows, but I want to get Ubuntu or some distro onto it.

I have installed Ubuntu 10.10 before and it runs flawlessly on it.

So, the Mini 10 has a 8GB SSD and I have put a 16GB SD card in the slot. I can save my own files onto the SD card, but I would like to be able to install apps onto the SD card rather than them just installing onto the default partition on the SSD.

Is it possible, remembering that when I install via the software packager I have no options where to install the program? I remember how Windows gave you that option of destination folder when installing. That's what I want.

Knowledge Cube
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Ian
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1 Answers1

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The problem is an application in Ubuntu is spread out all over the filesystem.

It will put the bulk of it's stuff in /usr (binaries and libraries), some stuff in /etc (configuration), some stuff in /var (transient files, logs), etc.

An application generally doesn't fit neatly into a single directory that you can just put somewhere else unfortunately.

You could copy files from all those locations over to the SD, and symlink where they came from so that the system can still find them, but it would get really messy really quickly.

Also, even if you did that, and if you were hoping to remove the SD and use it in another Ubuntu and use the apps on it, that won't work either, because the package database saves quite a bit of "state", meaning it knows what packages are installed and where all the files are, what version the app is and so on. If you simply plopped the SD containing the relevant files into another Ubuntu it wouldn't realise the files on it were part of an application.

In short - not really feasible.

Caesium
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