Replacing folders in home folder with links

[Yora0]

I've set up my system so that another partition is auto-mounted and in my account settings I have the standard destinations for music files, video files, and so on set to folders on that partition.

Now when I start the file manager, there is still the Home folder on the left side with the original standard directories for personal files. By Right click -> Create New -> Basic Link, I can create links to the directories on the other partition.
But I would like for them to appear just like the Public and Template folders, that are still on the Fedora partition.

I guess there are two solutions:
1. Replace the icon for a folder link to a folder icon.
2. In an earlier installation, where /home had its own partition, I've seen those directories as being mounted in some way when using the File Manager and selecting Home in the side bar. I would like to do that if that can be done manually.

Solution 2 would be preferable, but number 1 would probably work just as well. However, I don't know how to do either.

Fedora 17 KDE, by the way.

[Gareth Jones]

I don't know, in GNOME setting the user-dirs.dirs file should be enough, but maybe Dolphin/KDE has it's own ideas.

A rather hackish solution would be to add bind mounts to /etc/fstab:

/mnt/data/Documents    /home/you/Documents    none    bind    0    0

etc. /home/you/Documents etc. must be existing directories for this to work.

[DrHappyAngry]

I think this is what you're asking for, just delete the folder in your home dir and make a symlink.

[paulisdead@deepthought ~]$ rmdir Downloads/
[paulisdead@deepthought ~]$ mkdir /scratch/Downloads/
[paulisdead@deepthought ~]$ ln -s /scratch/Downloads/ /home/paulisdead/

Now if I click on Downloads in the side column it follows the link to there. Just so you know, it will still say /home/paulisdead/Downloads in the nautilus window in the example given above, as the path it's in, but it really is off in the other location under /scratch.

[Yora0]

Yes, that works.

But I think it doesn't look so elegant, now that I have that link icon on my folder icon. In an older installation, I saw those folders mounted to another partition in some way and was wondering how you could do that manually.

[DrHappyAngry]

Seriously, you're bugged that much by a little link emblem? Well you could always just bookmark the folder then they'll show up in the left hand pain. You could also use the bind mounts as suggested by Gareth. You used to be able to change emblems a lot easier in gnome 2, but apparently this isn't as easy in gnome 3.

You could always just move the whole home folder for the user over to the other drive, too. If you don't want to remount the whole new volume as /home, you could just copy the user's folder over and change the location of their home folder in /etc/passwd. If you're moving the user's home folder, be sure you copy it with either a cp -Rp or rsync -art to make sure it grabs hidden files and retains the proper permissions.

[Gareth Jones]

Originally Posted by DrHappyAngry

You could always just move the whole home folder for the user over to the other drive, too. If you don't want to remount the whole new volume as /home, you could just copy the user's folder over and change the location of their home folder in /etc/passwd. If you're moving the user's home folder, be sure you copy it with either a cp -Rp or rsync -art to make sure it grabs hidden files and retains the proper permissions.

The shared partition is shared with Windows, so the basic /home must stay on the Linux file-system for permissions and special files to work properly. That's why I suggested only pointing Documents etc. to the shared directories.

[DrHappyAngry]

Ah yes you're right, easy to forget the details a day later. So ya, that would probably not work well on a fat or ntfs partition.