Configuring computer's second disk & jellyfin clarification

Issues & Assistance
1

I’m a beginner to linux coming from windows, my computer has a second disk inside that I’d like to configure to use in a similar way as to how I used it in windows, currently I need to mount the second drive to use it, and need to authorize the mount and I assume I need to open the folder as admin to be able to create folders and modify files in it.

I’d like to use this disk to store heavier files for general use since the disk with root is smaller. So multimedia files, games and programming related stuff. From what I’ve gathered, what I want to do can most likely be done through setting a mountpoint with something like Gparted or the default KDE partition manager, or fstab through command line, though I prefer to use a graphical interface when possible. My issue is with finding a proper location to use as a mount point for my use case. I’ve heard that a folder within the home directory would be fine for this, but I’d like to clarification as I’ve already tried this and ended up overwriting my home directory with the second disk. While I don’t remember exactly it’s very possible that I set the path of the mount point wrong, pointing it to the home directory itself rather than a folder within it. Thankfully I considered something like this could happen so I didn’t store any files in this computer yet, so no data was lost.

As for the jellyfin part of the issue, I’ve read through the archlinux wiki’s section of it, and installed it though the cachyOS package installer since I understand that is usually the simplest and safest option when possible (I’m not entirely sure about how other methods to install software in linux work but the package installer seems to have everything I need so far) however I dislike it running as it’s own user and essentially running in the background all the time unless stopped, I’d like to know if there is some setting or alternative installation I can use that would allow me to have a file or something that I could use to activate and deactivate it, much like a desktop shortcut and that wouldn’t require me to mess with commands to give it permission to a specific folder for it to access multimedia files, as well as if there’s anything I should know to use it with the second disk.

Thanks!

2

It sounds like that is indeed what happened. Your home directly is a good place for secondary partition mounts. I have all three of mine there, but you have to specify the directory inside your home that you would like the mount to take place. So you would say /home/username/storage or /home/username/games and in those cases the “storage” or “games” directory would be the root of the drive.

This is correct.

Half and half here. It sounds like the simplest solution to your question here would be to use a couple simple scripts that you could execute just like desktop shortcuts as you mention.

According to the ArchWiki, you enabled the server by:

systemctl enable jellyfin

What enable does is it tells systemd to start this service at boot time, which doesn’t seem like what you’re looking for here. So if you enabled the service this way, you’ll want to undo that while also stopping the service if it is currently running:

systemctl disable --now jellyfin

So to activate and deactivate Jellyfin on demand you would use slightly different commands.

systemctl start jellyfin

and

systemctl stop jellyfin

To create files that will execute these commands without you manually entering the terminal to do so, you would create two empty files with the .sh file extension, like jellyfin-start.sh and jellyfin-stop.sh, and inside them put:

jellyfin-start.sh:

#!/usr/bin/bash

systemctl start jellyfin

jellyfin-stop.sh:

#!/usr/bin/bash

systemctl stop jellyfin

You will likely have to also make both files executable. Assuming you’re using KDE, you can do this by right clicking on them and opening their individual preferences. There will be a box you can check in there to allow them to be executed.

There are more elegant ways to do this but I figured breaking it down would make it easier to understand. These simple bash scripts are definitely what I would consider Linux basics so I think it’s valuable to learn how to use them.

If you’d ever like to check if your Jellyfin server is currently running without checking to see if the local web client is active, you can use

systemctl status jellyfin

Here’s a useful ArchWiki reference page for how systemd units can be controlled: