Re: ext3 or xfs for desktop laptop

[David R. Litwin]

Let me start thus: I've gotten so much valuable feed-back that it is illogical to do my normal shuffle-post. Hopefully what I write shan't be woefully out of context. Here goes.

I appologise that I neglected to give you the specs of my system, dolt that I am. The laptop has a  3.06 GHz Mobile P4 with (newly upgraded!) 1024MB RAM (minus the shared video ram which I can't adjust, for some reasdon.... But, that is neither hither, nor yon.). It is capable of hyper-threading, so I use smp. Fiinally, the hard-drive has around 80GB of storage.

It seems to me, still, that though XFS is faster (en general! Don't lop off my head for making a blanket statement!) and may become the standard at some point, ext3 is currently the most stable and reliable. I'm still not clear over the controvesy of having an ext2 /boot partition and an XFS / partition: Why shouldn't I do this (if I choose to use XFS) given that I do use GrUB? However, I am inclined, in this realm, to go with stability (shocking for those who know me: I'm a compulsive up-grader and have become one who uses svn / cvs for my most-used applications. Logical, eh? I love the Bleeding edge). In the past, this poor computer of mine has gone through a lot of turmoil. I've rebooted (both properly and using "The Button") enough that I worry a bit over how much damage I've done to it (what is this non-contiguous business that I see when fsck is run? It was once .somthing& and is now 5.9% I think.). Since I've heard good things about crash restoration (this laptop does crash) for ext3 and... not so good for XFS, I think the former is safer.

The swap business. To partition or to have... files? What are the pros and cons (feel free to link to a howto or tell me to do so)? Indeed, should I even _bother_ with a swap? Will it make that much of a difference? I haven't got one currenlty (not of my choice), but I don't know if there has been a decline in performance due to this.

Finally, I know that there can be no absolutely correct choice. I'm simply trying to get the best for my computer. I do _listen_ to a lot of music (an increasing amount in flac). But, I do not edit much. So, big files? Eh.... The biggest would be the music and an ocasional film / T. V. series (which I plan to watch more on my laptop, actually.)

I hope this helps. I know certainly that your comments are making this much easier for me.

Cheers.

P. S.: Partitioner-wise: My friend reccomended I stick GParted on to a CD and use that. Is this the best programme / way? Any comments?

Cheers again.


--
—A watched bread-crumb never boils.
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