Mounting your temp directories as devices will store the data in your computers ram instead of on the filesystem. This will reduce the writes made to your storage device, which is benificial for flash based systems. You can achieve this by adding various directories to your fstab (/etc/fstab) configuration file:
tmpfs     /var/log/apt   tmpfs       defaults          0   0
tmpfs     /var/log       tmpfs       defaults          0   0
tmpfs     /tmp           tmpfs       defaults          0   0
tmpfs     /var/tmp       tmpfs       defaults          0   0
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This is the ultimate backup solution. With this solution even if you need to completely reinstall your operating system you will retain all your settings and files completely without the need for any external backup whatsoever. All the partitioning can be done during the Ubuntu graphical installation. You going to want at least 2 partitions, with the largest one being your home folder. The OS partition only needs to be a couple of gigabytes; for instance mine are 4. I setup 3 extra partition, they had to be logical to do this, so I can have two operating systems. I have a Debian Etch installation, and a Gutsy GIbbon installation. Both operating systems successfully recognize my home folder location on the other partition, which I successfully automount to the /mount/username folder.
By placing your entire home folder on a completely separate partition, when you reinstall your OS all you will have to do is set to home folder of the user to the folder location of where the your home partition is mounted.
The extent of work that may have to be done is the following:
1) You may have to configure the home partition to mount in a location; sometimes it dousn’t mount.
2) To do this just open your fstab file, copy one of the lines that mounts a partition, duplicate that line, and chance the partition number to the one you are using for your home partition.
3) *Note that you cannot use the /home directory as a location to mount your home partition; I have run into issues with this. Instead just use a common ducted such as /media/username.
Since a lot of the software in Ubuntu Gutsy is not available on Debian Etch, you are going to want to make your Gnome Panel icons as completely compatible backwards compatible with Debian such that all the Gnome panels icons successfully load with them representing applications that exist on both operating systems. I have experiences with with Firefox as Debian uses Iceweasel. To accommodate I copied the Firefox icon from my Ubuntu system to my home folder, and use that icon to boot Iceweasel. It gels nicely.
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By default the USB Host system, when installed on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, is disable. To enable it is extremely simple. You can do it manually with “nano” or “gedit”. Open the following file:
sudo nano /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh
or:
sudo gedit /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh
In this configuration file there is the following section:
—————————————————————————-
#
# Magic to make /proc/bus/usb work
#
#mkdir -p /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs
#domount usbfs “” /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs -obusmode=0700,devmode=0600,listmo$
#ln -s .usbfs/devices /dev/bus/usb/devices
#mount –rbind /dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb
—————————————————————————————
To enable USB support simple remove the “#” sign in from the the bottom 4 lines so that the section looks like this:
—————————————————————————————
#
# Magic to make /proc/bus/usb work
#
mkdir -p /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs
domount usbfs “” /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs -obusmode=0700,devmode=0600,listmo$
ln -s .usbfs/devices /dev/bus/usb/devices
mount –rbind /dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb
————————————————————————————
Don’t forget to add the following line in your /etc/fstab configuration file (this is required to successfully mount USB devices in your VirtualBox guest OS):
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=1001,devmode=664 0 0
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