Why /home should be on a different partition than /

Nirbheek had advised me to always keep /home on a separate partition, and it came in handy today.

Introduction

Natty Narwhal is the new Ubuntu release made on 28th of April, 2011. When I tried to upgrade to it yesterday, bad things happened.

While the installation went smoothly up to the step Installing the upgrades, it simply hung after trying to Load lirc module on my HP dv2000 laptop. More so, my laptop became unresponsive. The next step I took (I do not know why I did it), was to open a terminal and type:

sudo reboot

The Problem


This was a really bad idea, as it turned out.

The next time I tried to log on, I was greeted with the unfriendly error:

Kernel crash while updating to Natty Narwhal

Better navigation options in Nautilus context menus

Am I the only one who is so used to the 'Right Click' + 'Back' option on Browsers that he keeps creating untitled folders everywhere in Nautilus?

Context menu in Nautilus 2.32.0

However, on a browser, it is the more convenient 'Back' option:

Context menu in Chrome (almost the same for Firefox and Internet Explorer too)

Volume of notification sounds in Empathy

I have been away from Gnome for too long, I guess. Until very recently, I was on the Awesome window manager but after upgrading to a new Harddrive (yes, I still upgrade my hardware old-skool way instead of buying something new), I though I'll give Gnome another look.

Also, I was feeling a little guilty about Ubuntu ditching Gnome for Unity.

While shifting, I also thought that I'll move my standard chatting program from Pidgin to Empathy, which seemed to be better integrated with Gnome. However, I had this constant problem of not getting any sound notifications when anyone pinged me (also because I keep playing music continuously in the background). The preferences did not give me an idea of what was wrong: