How can I use another disk besides the boot disk to store software installed with apt and the Software program? I have a smallish main drive and I have another with a whole bunch of room
Welcome to the forums!
This can be somewhat involved as there are many things to consider. Most software have dependencies (read: other software installed in the system), and make assumptions about where those dependencies exist in the filesystem. In addition, upon installation there may be several configuration files written to disk at different location which further complicates this kind of setup.
How small is the primary disk where you have Zorin OS installed?
One possibility is to format your external drive with two partitions, each for the /var and /home directories. These often are the largest directories; the former contains tings like logs, cached files, etc., and the latter is for your personal files.
This setup would give the most flexibility in terms of storage space and as a bonus, it'd be easier to re-install the OS from scratch without losing your personal files which would be safely stored in the external drive.
I would recommend no less than 128GB for each partition. Remember, it's easier to downsize a partition but it can be tricky to scale it up afterwards. Use as much space from the external drive as you can spare, and after a few months you can come back to it and reassess if you need to reclaim some of that space or not.
In Zorin OS you can use Disks to create the partitions as needed. Start by making those. If you are planning on use the external drive for something else as well, you'll probably need to resize the existing partition to make it smaller and make room for the new ones. If you need help with this, please share a screenshot of what the external drive looks like when you examine it with Disks.
Thanks! One of the things I haven't been able to figure out here is how to get the Software gui to recognize a different disk. I can get flatpak to have another repository, but not the GUI. Any thoughts?
Applications such as the Software store are not aware about drives, they only see the filesystem locations. Where to physically write the bytes when you save files or install programs is done by the Linux kernel, transparently to the rest of the OS.
To combine multiple drives you mount the partition from one drive onto the filesystem at the given location that you want. To "mount" a partition means to make it available to the filesystem at said location. When the computer boots, you need to configure it to tell it to search for the drive's partitions and mount them automatically for you.
Just to clarify, this seems like a different topic. A repository is a remote server you download files from. It's not related to where in your machine these files are stored. But as I said, this isn't an issue since all the real work would be done by the kernel.
Take a look at this thread for a similar scenario involving multiple drives:
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