On Sat, 11 Sep 2010 09:13:19 +0200 (CEST) [email protected] wrote: > What I mean is that I want the formatting data itself to take the > least space possible and thus leave me with the most of my 320 gb > drive.
First and quick: When you run the installer make sure that the partition where you store most of your data is formatted to have 0% reserved for root. This usually is set at the default of 5%, and if you have 300GB to partition and mkfs you already lost something like 15GB in the reservation. It probably isn't a good idea from a system's administration viewpoint, but as a personal machine it should be fine (plus you might want to play with quotas). There really isn't a feasible option(yet) on GNU+Linux in regards to transparent filesystem compression, which is what I would suggest. You could put your /home in a FUSE FS which has some zlib compression or other, there are a few of them out there that do that - however all the files in the rest of your filesystem wouldn't be compressed (which would be nice to see due to the nature of having a zillion small files throughout /*). ZFS provides compression and there is some ZFS-in-userspace (due to CDDL incompatibilities with GPL'd Linux, ZFS cannot be in the kernel). However, if you're OK with the cutting edge you can grab the latest kernel and try btrfs(not sure if you can boot from this yet) which provides compression and is seen as the way forward in terms of Linux filesystems. Remember backups. -- end
