Been playing around with Debian...

[Flatline]

This is interesting stuff! I installed Debian on an old box just to take a peek at it (I like to try out distros-sometimes it's cool, sometimes I think I just enjoy pain); my old PII 333 box w/256Mb of RAM and a SiS6326 vid card.

Anyway, after installing it I quickly added the listings necessary to work with "unstable" packages and installed KDE3.1 and Gnome2.2...that was easy! (after looking at a couple of docs).

I do use other distros at home and at work, but I do have to say that I was pretty impressed with apt-get; remember, though, I JUST started playing around, so we'll just see how happy I am when something breaks.

I did notice that on the install ISO the only file system choice available was ext2; that seems a bit odd to me, since it's not even a journalized file system (maybe I just got an old ISO?). If I want a "better" fs, should I just format the partition before the install (say, with XFS)?

 

[n0cmonkey]

There is an XFS install disk on the XFS site. Thats what I used last time.

 

[Flatline]

Thanks n0c!

 

[Nothinman]

ext2 is the only choice for now because even with the officiall woody release the 2.4 line of kernels was deemed too unstable to be the default, so 2.2.20 was the default kernel. And if you install a 2.4.x kernel it's simple to 'upgrade' ext2 to ext3 with 1 tune2fs command.

though, I JUST started playing around, so we'll just see how happy I am when something breaks.

I've been using unstable for probably over 4 years and I can count the times anything major has broken on one hand =) And even then it's usually only a day or so before it's fixed.

 

[civad]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
ext2 is the only choice for now because even with the officiall woody release the 2.4 line of kernels was deemed too unstable to be the default, so 2.2.20 was the default kernel.And if you install a 2.4.x kernel it's simple to 'upgrade' ext2 to ext3 with 1 tune2fs command.

Hehe...the laziness in me took over my (in)sanity and I installed Libranet 2.0 with ReiserFS

 

[pac1085]

I always choose to install debian with the bf-2.4 kernel, and get presented with the options to use ReiserFS/EXT3. (3.0r1 cd)

 

[Nothinman]

Hehe...the laziness in me took over my (in)sanity and I installed Libranet 2.0 with ReiserFS

I don't trust my data to ReiserFS.

 

[Flatline]

I found an install ISO out there with XFS support (and reiserfs) built in:

http://www.physik.tu-cottbus.de/~george/woody_xfs/

Nothinman, is your aversion to reiserfs because it is relatively new? I have to admit that I generally use XFS on my machines because it is fast, mature, and stable, but I've never had any problems with reiser (note that I don't use reiser on servers).

 

[Nothinman]

Nothinman, is your aversion to reiserfs because it is relatively new? I have to admit that I generally use XFS on my machines because it is fast, mature, and stable, but I've never had any problems with reiser (note that I don't use reiser on servers).

My aversion to ReiserFS is based on the fact that Hans and his team can't stick with a decision. Early ReiserFS in the 2.2 and early 2.4 kernel patches had one on disk format, a minor revision later 2.2 kernels weren't supported and there was an on disk format change and now Reiser4 is a complete rewrite. If they ever stick to one thing and get it working well they'll have a great product, I think that if they ever get it (the format, interface, etc) stable it could be the new defacto standard unix filesystem but that'll never happen as long as they keep starting over. Then there was endian issues that made it nonfunctional on my Alphas and Sparcs, though I think those are taken care of now. I've been using XFS on my main box for some time now, I even put it on one of the filesystems on my Ultra2 mailserver because it's much faster for large directories ( i.e. hundreds of thousands of entries) than ext[23].

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Flatline
I found an install ISO out there with XFS support (and reiserfs) built in:

http://www.physik.tu-cottbus.de/~george/woody_xfs/

Nothinman, is your aversion to reiserfs because it is relatively new? I have to admit that I generally use XFS on my machines because it is fast, mature, and stable, but I've never had any problems with reiser (note that I don't use reiser on servers).

I belive his hesitation with Reiser is the fact that in many versions many major changes were made. The development isnt at a stable point yet. Thats the main reason I dont use it.

EDIT: He beat me to it, with a better explanation too!

 

[n0cmonkey]

You journaled FS nuts will like this: JFS ported to FreeBSD.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
You journaled FS nuts will like this: JFS ported to FreeBSD.

Does anyone have any experience with JFS on Linux(or any other non AIX os for that matter)?
I haven't seen much talk about it, mostly it seems like people debate Ext3 vs Reiser vs XFS, but JFS is often left out.

 

[Nothinman]

The version of JFS that IBM GPL'd is the one from OS/2, not AIX, so many of the high-end features aren't there yet. I believe they plan on implementing them and migrating AIX to that version of JFS eventually, but who knows how long that'll take. JFS seems decent, but XFS seems to be a more feature complete and better tested (SGI uses the same code base on both Irix and Linux ) filesytem.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
The version of JFS that IBM GPL'd is the one from OS/2, not AIX, so many of the high-end features aren't there yet. I believe they plan on implementing them and migrating AIX to that version of JFS eventually, but who knows how long that'll take. JFS seems decent, but XFS seems to be a more feature complete and better tested (SGI uses the same code base on both Irix and Linux ) filesytem.

Slow and steady wins the race. You linux guys are all about features. Evolution over revolution. Its slower, but it works

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
The version of JFS that IBM GPL'd is the one from OS/2, not AIX, so many of the high-end features aren't there yet. I believe they plan on implementing them and migrating AIX to that version of JFS eventually, but who knows how long that'll take. JFS seems decent, but XFS seems to be a more feature complete and better tested (SGI uses the same code base on both Irix and Linux ) filesytem.

Now that you mention it, I seem to remember reading about that somewhere(here perhaps? ).

Just seems like a few people rave about JFS being so good and blah blah blah, but since hardly anyone uses it, I haven't really seen much concrete evidence that it rocks/sucks.
XFS would seem like the logical successor to Ext3 though, seeing as it's rather mature already, and being included in 2.6, and unlike JFS is already in quite wide spread use.

 

[Flatline]

Well, the install ISO for Debian on XFS officially worked like a charm!

I'm in the process of upgrading my system from the unstable repositories.