Locating Downloaded file structures / programs on externally-accessed HDD

[jonnyjonx (E W J Lamb)]

I’ve installed Fedora 33 and it’s working fine.
Previously I had Fedora 30 on another computer, which recently failed, so I removed the HDD with the old data on it, and I can access most of my work.

However, on the old computer, I used certain programs like GIMP, Ghostscript and so on.
I was hoping to be able to find the downloaded packages for these, and re-use by moving them to the new computer without re-downloading.

But, I can’t find where these programs are stored on the old HDD.

Also: The file system structure, where one sees folders such as lib, share, etc, temp, home and so on, is not viewable on the external HDD… but when that computer was working, it was so. How come this is the case ?

If these questions make sense, please can somebody very briefly explain ? Thanks

[alciregi (Alessio)]

Hello @jonnyjonx and welcome to the community. Please have a look to the #start-here category in order to learn how this forum works.

Talking about your question… Well, I don’t know how this disk was partitioned and why you can’t see the old system content. But don’t worry, you have not to recover the programs. Programs are not self contained, when they are installed, they disseminate a lot of files around various directories (/lib, /usr, /etc, …) so it would be pretty impossible to recover them, even if you would be able to mount the old system folders from the old disk. And even if you will be able to accomplish the titanic task to recover the single pieces of each program, it is unlikely they will work on F33 since many libraries, modules, etc. are changed compared to F30.

Long story short, don’t worry. The way to go is: reinstall them! In the GNU/Linux world, package managers and repositories are here to ease your life in situations like this.

You use GIMP? Use GNOME Software, search GIMP and install it. Or if you are confident with the command line: sudo dnf install gimp

But you don’t want to re-download them due to network bandwidth constraint?