Are you talking about da machine that dual boots Mint and Bodhi, or two machine? What do you mean by "move" rather than "copy". If you want to move data to a new partition it has to be copied there.

To use a new partition /home you need to manually edit /etc/fstab

Assuming you are currently using just one partition mounted on /, you need to add a line like:

UUID=xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx /home      ext4  defaults    0    2

NB: once you add this, your old /home will not be accessible, so you need to copy the data to the new partition first.

Hi there, Graeme P:

Yes, my machine dual boots, with Bodhi Linux on one partition, and Linux Mint on another partition.

You said:

"If you want to move data to a new partition it has to be copied there."

Ok, so if I want Home to be on a separate partition, it has to copy all the files over, right? It's not like if you are just moving (or cut and pasting) a bunch of files from one folder to another folder on the same installation / partition? (i.e., from your home folder to your Desktop folder)?

~~~~

Is there anyway to move the mysql tables over en masse? Or do I just need to use sql export function of all the tables and then re-import them? It's not that I am lazy... it is because I am sure to mess things up if I have to do it that way.

~~~~

One more questoion:

I use thunderbird on Bodhi Linux. I would like to use it on the Linux Mint partition as well.

Should I install thunderbird in Mint first and then find all by thunderbird data on Bodhi and copy it over?

I am assuming that for most of the apps I have, I will have to install the app under Mint, then I will have to find the old data folders and copy them to the new locations under Mint. Hopefully they are similar / the same locations.

I doubt this will help but on a new Mint installation you have the option of creating several paritions including / for filesystem, /home and swap. The trick there is selecting a proper size; I ended up with 10G for /, 2G for swap, the rest for /home. Not sure if you would be allowed to do that on a dual-boot, though and there will probably be a problem retro-fitting partitions.

Since they are both linux and both systems are available to each other, can you not use a single copy of MySQL data? If not, Backup the whole MySQL data using MySQL Workbench or similar and Restore to the other OS. Quite simple. I have also, on Windows, simply copied the MySQL data folder from one machine to another; if the two are set up similarly that works.

Thunderbird should have been installed as part of the Mint installation (ditto firefox). The data is in the home folder (hidden) so either point the new system to that or copy (literally or via backup) the data structure ./thunderbird to the new system. Check the data folder name within the ./thunderbird folder but the two should be different, giving you the installed database and the "imported" one. If the same, rename the pre-installed one for now.

I don't know if bodhi has the same function but in Mint it's possible to create a list of currently installed apps and then run the script on a new machine to install the same ones. Data is not copied but this method goes some way towards a solution. Details at [cyberciti.biz...]

Agree with dstiles except I would have a larger / partition if the hard drive is large or if you plan to install games.

Parted/GParted can resize partitions, but back up everything first. I do not think it can cope with encrypted partitions (encryption at directory level as Ubuntu now does should be OK).

Not sure how well the app list and install will work because Bodhi has its own repos. You could run into issues with dependencies.

I'm still working on installing the computer mentioned above - I generally only get an hour or less per day to do it.

Today I ran a get_iplayer script I created some time ago. The basic software was installed as part of the installation script I mentioned but I had to install the actual bash script in the home folder - the install script doesn't go that far. Running the bash script gave an output that I haven't seen in a few months so I checked the Software Sources: the install script does not install sources, only whatever software it can find. Reasonable, I suppose, but it's important to realise the installation script only does a partial job.

I've never had much success with gparted. In the current case I underestimated the / partition size. I gave up trying to resize it and reinstalled from scratch, which was not really onerous.

"Since they are both linux and both systems are available to each other, can you not use a single copy of MySQL data?"

I would like to do that, but I don't know how...

It is for a web application but it is not on the internet / lan or anything. But I do access the data through a browser.

Don't know if I can just copy the whole thing over or not... I guess it is not too hard to just export it with an SQL command and then import into the Mint installation.

You can specify the path in your MySQl config file.

I am not sure it is a good idea though. Suppose you upgrade MySQL in one install and not the other, then you could have two versions of MySQL using the same data which sounds a bit risky to me.

You can just copy the files from the data directory to the new one. Try copying everything in /var/lib/mysql

Ahh... thank you so much for listing the directory where the mysql files are located. I will try and copy them over that way (I will, of course, make backups first... this time!)

it would be better to shut down MySQL before copying.