Recovering from interesting times
So, I've got most of my work on an external drive and I've got a nice fresh /home in its own partition. Why not just slap the contents of the backup into /home and declare victory? Well, a fair amount of cruft has accumulated in my /home directory. It could be organized more conveniently. I've got various software development tools installed here and there, and shell scripts in various places. And I really don't need all the jar files and libraries and sample code and old projects and local maven repo and copies of articles to read in my spare time and on and on and on. It's just clutter.
I took the time to decide what I really need on this machine and how it should be organized, and then selectively restore those items from the backup. I also decided to reinstall just the software that I'm actively using, rather than to reinstall everything that had been on the system before.
The default /home directory structure is:
/home
|
+---- Desktop
|
+---- Documents
|
+---- Music
|
+---- Pictures
|
+---- Public
|
+---- Templates
|
+---- Videos
Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X also ship with a similar default directory structure. The default structure is only a suggestion, to help novice computer users get started. But I just don't organize information according to file type (music, pictures, videos, etc.) I keep files that pertain to a given topic together, whatever their various formats and types. I decided to define a structure that reflects the way I usually think about what I'm doing with the computer.
At the highest level, I don't want to have to look at a million folder names to find what I'm looking for. It boils down to this:
/home
|
+---- Desktop
|
+---- Personal
|
+---- Professional
|
+---- .bin
I changed the top-level directory structure just below /home to the above, and removed the old directory names from the Places pane.
Next: Installing basic ruby support
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