Re: [Fwd: Re: here i come !]

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

This is exactly the obscure sort of technical choice we *shouldn't*
present if we are really targeting home users. There are options
though... For example, what about having a low battery mode that mounts
the filesystem as ext2 (you can mount ext3 filesystems as ext2 as far as
I understand, right?). Things like that that end up being transparent.

-Seth

On Mon, 2002-06-24 at 07:19, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> On Mon, 2002-06-24 at 15:15, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
> > > > > > * use of devfs, murasaki for hotplug, choice between ext2 and ext3, etc.
> > > > > > (this might be a little too low-level for this discussion i must admit). 
> > > > > The user should not be able to choose. Let's just use ext3 and be done
> > > > > with it :)
> > > > 
> > > > No, using ext2 has its uses. A journaled filesystem on a laptop is
> > > > pretty bad for the batteries. And it's an easy question to ask.
> > 
> > I might be totally clueless here, but I always felt that an installer 
> > should explain to me why I would choose one over the other.  I agree that 
> > sensible defaults are a good thing, and a project like this should make 
> > the decision of using xfs, ext3, jfs or reiserfs for the user IMO.
> > But when it's between ext2 and ext3, the installer should tell me "these 
> > are the cases where you would want ext2".  This is something that the 
> > installers I've used neglect to tell me.
> > 
> > I do have to admit that I didn't know there was merit in using ext2 on a 
> > laptop.  I had huge problems with apm in the past causing the whole 
> > machine to lock up, so I was glad to finally have ext3 support.  What 
> > exactly is the advantage of ext2 ?
> 
> Minimum hard disk activity, it's easier on the batteries than ext3 that
> syncs to disk too often. Of course that doesn't apply to crashy laptops
> ;)
> 
> If you use ext3 on a laptop you should mount this partition with the
> noatime option, so it doesn't write stuff to disk every time you access
> a file that's already cached.
> 
> Cheers
> 
> -- 
> /Bastien Nocera
> http://hadess.net