Been away from linux for a while. Now ext4 is out and I’m unfamiliar with it as of now. I did do an install with 11.2 KDE on ext4 keeping default options, but seems sluggish compared to what I remember.
Old Laptop
Dell C810
1.13 P3
GeForce 2 Go
512MB RAM
5400 30GB harddrive (will switch to 7200 60GB soon)
Which file system would be best and what options? I believe I used reiserfs on it before.
reiserfs, ext3 or ext4? options?
P.S. Anyone got suspend working OK on this kind of system, specifically with the GeForce 2 GO? I did disable intel_agp and added ‘Option “NvAGP” “3”’ to xorg.conf. Didn’t work for me before. Before, I think I also had ACPI=off for kernel parm.
Docking? Using the big dock with floppy, USB Card and ethernet card. Works ok, just ejection freezes it.
mhenry676 wrote:
> Old Laptop
> Dell C810
> 1.13 P3
> GeForce 2 Go
> 512MB RAM
> 5400 30GB harddrive (will switch to 7200 60GB soon)
>
> Which file system would be best and what options? I believe I used
> reiserfs on it before.
>
> reiserfs, ext3 or ext4? options?
The desktop environment and software will have a larger impact on
performance that the file system by order of magnitude. From the above,
use ext4.
If you wish superior performance you could try a lighter weight desktop instead.
If your old Dell has a DVD, then some viable lightweight installation options are:
xfce desktop - choose “other” during install and select “xfce”. This is lighter than kde or gnome, and has slightly superior performance, but its still fairly heavy
lxde desktop. Choose “other” during install and select the “minimal X desktop” option. Then after install, add the LXDE pattern and install LXDE. You need to send two commands as root for that per the guidance here: SuSE - LXDE.org
zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/lxde/openSUSE_11.2/ X11_lxde
zypper in -t pattern LXDE
… or if your old laptop has only a CD drive, then instead you could try SuSE-On-Active-Diet (SOAD) which uses the lightweight Enlightenment. Link here to SOAD: http://sda.scwlab.com/soad_linux.html Note with only 512MB of RAM you may need to do a text install of SOAD. Do that by selecting F3 and text mode at the first boot menu. Then login to the text prompt as user “linux” with password “soad”. Type “su” (to get root/admin permissions) and use password “soad”. Then run “yast” and navigate to Miscellaneous and select “installation”. After the install is complete I recommend you disable ALL repositories (soad has a zillion preselected) except for OSS, Non-OSS, Update and Packman.
The benchmarks I have seen show ext4 out performing ext3 by a fair margin in a number of areas,This varied somewhat with controller and disc combinations,but over all ext4 came out on top.Unless you can do a direct comparison,with benchmarks on your hardware I would go with ext4. reiserfs remains a decent file system but I have seen no bench mark comparison.
If you see the need,you can tune the file system once installed.
What’s left of the Namesys team after the chief developer went to jail works on reiserfs4, but this hasn’t been accepted in the mainline kernel. Very few developers outside Namesys work on the innards of reiserfs3.
(Back in the day, I did a bit of boot time benchmarking, and at that time I was quite happy with reiser from the point of view of minimising boot time on my old IBM 600E. I did lose some data on it, over time, though.)
Slightly difficult question; I expect that you would get a slightly faster boot time with reiser, but I would try to get acceptable performance out of one of the others, rather than use reiser today, because of the support issue. Actually, my current approach is to rarely/never reboot my laptop, and then boot time is less of an issue…
Have you turned off atime? That is probably the biggest single perf improver. Then, are you willing to take risks with your data, because changing the journalling mode might have some mileage in it, if you are prepared to take risks?
If you do look at benchmarking reports, you’ll almost certainly find a ‘this is fastest under this situation, that is fastest under that under that situation’ and I suspect that there are no big gains to be had, over all the access patterns, by changing filesystem type.
For ext4, there are more levers that you can pull at to try to tweak perf; I can’t remember which is the best performing setting for write barriers though.
I had used reiserfs in the past with noatime and notail options.
I do like to use KDE4 as opposed to others. I’ll try to customized what packages get installed.
Any suggestions as to what packages aren’t needed in the default install for just using it for web browsing and remoting with remote desktop and vnc. That’s my primary use plus sometimes music and videos. I use it at home mostly and all my “safe” files would be on a file server so turning off journaling is an option.