Light or Standard

[astro4travel]

I have a old NEC P-2, 333 mghts 6 gig hd with 168mg. or RAM. My question is, should I use the light edition or standard Vl? I really don't need a lot of hard drive space for anything else. This is mostly a hobby horse. Thanx

[M0E-lnx]

Light

[astro4travel]

Thanks,
before installation is finished I received the message that "couldn't install vmlinu-Dev that the file is corrupt, or that the partition is full. Now, this is a 6g hd. I partitioned it so that the swap has 500m, and the root has 5000m or close to 4 gigs I belive, and finally home partion about 900m. Should I make the root partition larger? I ran a check for corrupted files on the disk and found nothing. After 4 trys it is becoming a bit frustrating. Thanx in advance.

[M0E-lnx]

I really doubt your hard drive space is a problem with VL Light.
It should come very well under 3GB or around there

I think you have a bad burn

[astro4travel]

I will do another burn and let you know. thanks.

[astro4travel]

 Well, I redid the burn and also changed the file system from reiserfs to ext.3. I read somewhere on the forum that reiserfs could cause some problems. This is a old system anyway so I thought ext. 3 may possibly work better. Kept the partitions the same size and installed all the packages and everything else. Result? Success!  . Just thought I would post this in case anyone else could be having the same problem. Looking forward to being an active member with the forum. Thanks for all of your help. Michael

[Windozer]

Hi Astro, welcome to the forum!

I'm not sure about this, but I think you should be able to use reiser instead of ext3... maybe it was only the burn that was bad. There are many advantages to using reiser over ext3 ... you'll see this the first time you've used your system a while, saving some files and then have a power failure... it might take some time for the system to repair the filesystem, whereas reiser logs (journals) the entries, in essence, and makes the fix much faster. On a 6 gig drive this won't matter that much, but if you have to reboot unexpectedly often, ext3 can get really annoying.

there is a simple command to convert an ext3 to a reiser filesystem... maybe one of our other helpful forum members can jump in and post it.

cheers,
Howard in Florida
~~~~~~~~~~~

[astro4travel]

I would like indeed to know that command. Also how do I change my screen resolution on my monitor? Is it in system settings or just a simple command? Thanks again!

[GrannyGeek]

There are many advantages to using reiser over ext3 ... you'll see this the first time you've used your system a while, saving some files and then have a power failure... it might take some time for the system to repair the filesystem, whereas reiser logs (journals) the entries, in essence, and makes the fix much faster. On a 6 gig drive this won't matter that much, but if you have to reboot unexpectedly often, ext3 can get really annoying.

I think you mean ext2 rather than ext3. ext3 is a journaling file system, so it should also log changes and thus largely prevent file system corruption. ext2 is not a journaling file system and would require repairs, plus it'll run a check often during boot (maybe every time?) making boots take longer.

I always recommend using a journaling file system (reiserfs and ext3 having been around the longest). I would advise astro4travel not to use ext2.

there is a simple command to convert an ext3 to a reiser filesystem

There is? First I've heard of it. I know there's a command to convert ext2 to ext3. The command adds journaling to ext2, which I think is the most fundamental difference between ext2 and ext3 (largely a guess on my part).

Maybe someone can jump in here and set us straight.
--GrannyGeek

[Windozer]

Granny Geek,

you're partly right about ext3 - it's ext2 with a journal added.  The docs I've found do show converting from ext2 AND ext3 (three) to Reiser.  I think PartedMagic at least has such a converter - I've used it several times.  And *I think* you can safely do the conversion to an existing partition with data, because it just adds the journal stuff. This I've done too.

I have noticed that the same machine with an 80 gig drive, (minus the swap partition), formatted to ext3 takes noticeably longer to fsck than when it's formatted to Reiser. 

For more info, see
man filesystems
man fsck.ext3

This is a bit dated (Aug., 2001) , so I'm not sure how accurate it still is (- in other words, has ext3 been improved since):

ext3 is the "half" of a journaling filesystem mentioned above [Reiser, JFS, XSF]. Why half? It is a layer atop the traditional ext2 filesystem that does keep a journal file of disk activity so that recovery from an improper shutdown is much quicker than that of ext2 alone. But, because it is tied to ext2, it suffers some of the limitations of the older system and therefore does not exploit all the potential of the pure journaling filesystems. This is not entirely bad, though, because it means that ext3 partitions do not have a file structure different from ext2, so backing out to the old system (by choice or in the event the journal file were to become corrupted) is extremely simple.

from http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/3726/1/

HTH
- Howard
PS I'd also like to direct Astro4Travel to your question to Caitlyn about Reiser:
http://forum.vectorlinux.com/index.php?topic=8579.msg58032#msg58032

[astro4travel]

I did a reinstall and now am using the "reiserfs"filing system. I don't know if it is my imagination, but apps seem to load faster on this "dinosaur". I will keep everyone posted if there are any problems. Thanks GrannyGeek for the info. Michaels

[caitlyn]

Yes, reiserfs is faster than ext3.  xfs is faster still and is the one I recommend.  Since you don't want to reinstall again live with what you have 

GrannyGeek:  FYI:  both jfs and xfs have been around longer than ext3 and reiserfs.  xfs has been in use on SGI systems for something like 20 years.  jfs, by IBM, is at least as old.  I generally recommend either of those over reiserfs.  There are still occasional issues with data corruption in reiserfs.  It's the reason Red Hat still refuses to support that filesystem.  ext3, OTOH, is incredibly reliable.  It just doesn't perform as well as the other three.

[Windozer]

Caitlyn,

doesn't the performance have to do with file sizes and the amount of files? I recall reading a while back that one is good for lots of small files, and another is good for a smaller number of large files...

- H

[caitlyn]

Howard,

You are correct to a certain extent.  However, in real world tests with large clients xfs outperforms all of the other filesystems in both scenarios.  ext3 is slow in pretty much any scenario.

[Windozer]

Interesting, Caitlyn

> large clients xfs outperforms all of the other filesystems

Do you know of any reason for not just formatting all our VL partitions with XFS, aside from the lack of resizing tools you and M0E discussed*?

(* in the thread mentioned immediately above)