reiserfs and bzip
Forum: DSL Ideas and Suggestions
Topic: reiserfs and bzip
started by: kitchen
Posted by kitchen on Feb. 22 2004,09:19
Just a suggestion.. I think adding reiserfs support to the kernel, reiserfs utilities, and bzip programs to the cd would be excellent 
I grabbed the DSL cd so I could install gentoo on my laptop and was disappointed to find that it didn't have support for reiserfs or bzip (even reiser support in the kernel would have been nice, if nothing more)
For some reason the gentoo liveCD wouldn't work with my wireless card, but DSL did, so I was going to use it to install gentoo...
I don't think adding these would make the distribution much larger, and would make it incredibly useful
Having reiserfs support would also make it very good for a recovery cd type of application, and its small size already puts it in that category.
Just my two cents
-Jeremy
Posted by hasty on Feb. 22 2004,11:34
Horses for courses.........I know where you're coming from Jeremy, but I don't think thats Johns intention
Otherwise we'd have no wordprocessor, spreadsheet, xmms etc..
There are other knoppix based distros out there which are more directly focused on recovery.
For example the console version of Feather (at < http://featherlinux.berlios.de/tiny-list) >
and Toms rtbt are both available as recovery CD's.
Posted by cs25x on Feb. 27 2004,17:38
I have come to dislike ext ( 2 & 3 ), I have used reiserfs for 4 years or so, it is foolproof. It is heaps faster than ext3. ext3 will still force a fsck under some circumstances. I just looked to see if DS had reiser because I prefer a filesystem that is not going to screw me when I give a CD to my nurdless sister who is barely at the stage where she can click a mouse provided it only has one button. In fact I was going to ask for reiserfs, but did a search first and found this entry. Please junk ext3, it is slow and wastes space. Once you upgrade you will never go back to a fsck.
Posted by cbagger01 on Feb. 28 2004,17:52
I would prefer that DSL have ResiserFS tools and have the choice to do a hard disk install to a ReiserFS partition. ReiserFS is more stable and it gives even very old PCs (Like my 60Mhz Pentium) a performance improvement over Ext2/3.Unfortunately, the full ReiserFS tool suite takes up space on the 50MB sized CD.
I have been able to "Mount" existing ReiserFS partitions with DSL 0.5.x , so if you are adventurous you may be able to use a different liveCD like KNOPPIX to create your ReiserFS partition and then reboot using DSL and do a semi-manual hard disk install of DSL to your newly created partition.
Good Luck.
Posted by cs25x on Mar. 02 2004,19:53
I could be wrong, I often am, but I just checkedon the space requirements of ext and reiser
packages ( arch linux 0.6 ) and the reiser suite
is about 1M while the ext stuff runs out to 2M.
There is probably some stuff like debug that
could be removed to save a bit more.
If I am right, you save on the iso space by going
to reiser, and you are win win win.
The performance difference is enormous.
reiserfs means being able to listen to xmms on
my old Toshiba with a P166. extfs is just too
slow, and face it, at the other end of the scale,
people Hate waiting for fsck to finish on an 80G
hard drive
Posted by cbagger01 on Mar. 03 2004,05:03
My previous assumption was that reiserfs would be an additional supported fs, and not a replacement for extfs. Given the widespread use of ext file system, I would guess that removing the extfs support would produce a bunch of complaints from users.I would like to have Reiserfs support in DSL and prefer it hands down to ext2/3 especially on old computers, but not at the expense of eliminating extfs support.
I am pleasantly surprised at the unexpectedly small size of the arch linux reiser package. However, my guess is that the 1MB size is compressed size and that is too much space when you only have a 50MB compressed CDROM iso image to work with.