Questions about bootloader

Discussion
61

Why does it exist?
Is there anything in it?
Is anything mounted to it?

Dont be phased by ln it is the most counter-intuitive command in linux. I have used it for over 40 years and still have to look up the man page every time I use it.

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62

Well, it´s the third partition of HDD.

Yes, all my personal data.

Hmm, I still cannot seem to comprehend the syntax.

In the ubuntuusers.de wiki they give the following example for a symbolic link (here):

In the following example, a link on the desktop (Verknüpfung_mit_Tagesplaner) will be created. It points to a file named haupt.odt in the user’s home directory:

ln -s /home/BENUTZER/Dokumente/Tagesplaner/Aufgaben/haupt.odt /home/BENUTZER/Arbeitsfläche/Verknüpfung_mit_Tagesplaner

So don´t they have it the wrong way too?

63

So you have your third partition mounted to it… right?
You will have to unmount it first ie unmount /media/…
Then it will be just an empty mount point
Then it would be safe to remove it… ie rm /media/…
and replace it with a link to /data… ie ln -s /data /media/…
then you can mount /data in fstab

ln -s /home/BENUTZER/Dokumente/Tagesplaner/Aufgaben/haupt.odt /home/BENUTZER/Arbeitsfläche/Verknüpfung_mit_Tagesplaner

So don´t they have it the wrong way too?

No, that is correct, the last one (…Tagesplaner ) is the linkname

I told you ln was counterintuitive. Its maker must have been standing on his head.

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64

Thanks, Neville, for your reply, :wave:

Yes, the 3rd partition /dev/sdb3 at present (I mounted it manually) looks like this:

df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
[...]
/dev/sdb1        23G   17G  5,1G  77% /
[...]
/dev/sdb2        35G   27G  6,1G  82% /home
[...]
/dev/sdb3       385G  167G  199G  46% /media/rosika/f14a27c2-0b49-4607-94ea-2e56bbf76fe1
[...]

…

I see. At least I hope so…

Thanks for your patience, Neville. :blush:

I´m glad I understood it correctly then.

Yes, ln seems very counterintuitive indeed. Normally I get things right but with this one I seem to have encountered some difficulties.

Thanks so much for your help, Neville. :heart:

Many greetings from Rosika :slightly_smiling_face:

65

Hi Rosika,
Glad you agree
most people think… " I want x to be a pointer to y"
but ln does… " I have this thing called y , and I want to make a pointer to it, and call the pointer x"

Good luck if you decide to do the fstab bit

Regards
Neville

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66

Thanks, Neville, :wave:

That´s actually quite a good explanation. I´ll try to rember that in the future :blush: .

BTW: in the wake of our discussion I was looking at different ways of displaying mountpoints in the terminal.

I already knew mount, df and lsblk but I also encountered findmnt, which I have to admit was new to me.

Here I found a good article explaining it.
It´s a pretty lengthy but well-written article and I´m not through with it yet.

the default output from findmnt is tabulated and contains a tree showing the hierarchy of the mount points

I just had to familiarize myself with the nomenclature:
So “target” would seem to be the equivalent to “mount point”:

  • Target: The location of the mount point in the file system

…

Thanks so much, Neville.
Many greetings from Rosika :slightly_smiling_face:

67

That is a good article
Did you notice all those mounts generated by snap?

68

Yes, Neville, now that you say it.
You´re right.

According to ubuntuusers :

Technically speaking, snaps are a single file that includes a squashFS file system, which in turn contains the program, the needed libraries, man-pages, etc. At the startup of the system, the current version of all active snaps is mounted, the mount point is the /snap/named structure with the /snap/NameDesSnaps/Version number.

(translation via “TranslateLocally for Firefox” add-on)

I guess that´s the reason for the abundance of snap mountpoints.

I´m glad I have no snaps whatsoever on my system (:wink:), so my entire setup looks less cluttered.

Many greetings from Rosika :slightly_smiling_face:

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