Reinstall 0

Yesterday, I noticed that the root partition of my Dell 1545n laptop was 97% full. This was not good. I was close to reaching the point that stuff would not work because the partition was full.

When I installed Slackware on that machine, I established three partitions: root, home, and swap. I gave root 20 GB, but, over the several years since I first put Slackware on this box, I’ve installed lots of stuff, and space was running out. Root needed more space.

I first tried resizing the partitions with GParted, but that failed; it seems the root was on a primary partition and /home (where everything else lived) was on an extended partition. I first set that configuration up so long ago that I don’t remember making those choices, but I must have.

Since resizing was not an option, I knew I had to reformat and reinstall. Consequently, I rsync’d my home partition to my Zareason file server to back up everything in /home, including all my configuration and data files.

I repartitioned and installed Slackware 14.1 (the box started with Slackware 13.37), giving root one-third more disk space (30 GB rather than 20 GB), then updated it to Slackware –Current.

Six hours later, everything important was reinstalled, reconfigured, and working, including my mutt email configuration, and all the dust-bunnies from four or so years of usage had been cleared out. Much of today was spent making this happen.

My first adventure with Linux was installing Slackware 10.0 ten years ago. I’m now running Slackware Current on two boxes (and Mageia and Mint on other machines), because Slackware is the distro of iron: it always works and never breaks. (Ten or fifteen years ago, who would have imagined having more than one computer in the house?)

Ten years ago, I had no idea what I was doing, but I somehow managed to self-host my website on a Slackware box in my guest room. It took me from April to August in 2005 to bring it live. Now I can muddle through a reinstall and restore in less than a day.

I think I’ve learned something, and I’ve sure had a lot of fun along the way.