[vereri]

I moved my applications to a different partition and created a symlink to them. This was my first attempt to move my apps to a different volume. I'm wondering what problems I should anticipate, and if there's a better way to do this, such as using netinfo.

I've already encountered one problem. In copying my files to a separated volume I forgot to use cpmac and so I lost some icons, one of which was iPhoto's. (I was actually surprised about this; I didn't think icons for any of their current apps in the resource fork.) I couldn't think of a better way to recover the icon than to download and reinstall. At any rate, iPhoto's installer doesn't give you a choice of where to install. When I tried to install it, it pretended like everything was OK, and said that installation was successful, but did not, in fact, correctly follow the symlink. When I checked the Applications folder nothing was there.

I got around this by temporarily changing the symlink's name, creating an Applications folder, and installing there. After the installation, I moved iPhoto to the correct location. However, I'm not going to want to keep on doing that.

Any suggestions?

[parsec]

Originally posted by vereri:
I moved my applications to a different partition and created a symlink to them. This was my first attempt to move my apps to a different volume. I'm wondering what problems I should anticipate

I've run a setup like this on a beige g3 from 10.1 to 10.2.6 or so. I don't recommend it.
Apple's Installer program doesn't play nicely with symlinks (at least 10.2 and lower didn't.. I don't know about panther). You'll be ok if you download updates and then install them using Pacifist, however, Apple's installer/updater will delete the symlink and create an Applications directory, installing any new software in the folder. This can be particularly problematic when an app is just being patched; the new version in the newly created Applications (or Applications/Utilities) folder will not be functional at all. At least you'll still have the old version on the other partition.

Anyway, since I got my powerbook I decided it wasn't worth all the hassle. I do have a third-party software directory in the /Applications directory with is actually a symlink pointing to a different partition; this is where I stick large non-Apple apps I don't want filling up my system partition.

hope this helps.

[vereri]

Yeah, I'm sure you're right. I thought I noticed the iPhoto installer overwriting the symlink once, but I couldn't reproduce it.

I have a 2 GB partition which is empty. My new plan is to try to automount it at either /Applications or /Network/Applications. Now I just need to figure out how to do that! It sucks that there's so much less documentation on how to administer Mac OS X compared to, say, Windows 2000.