[clue-talk] Asus EEe and Linux distros

[Angelo Bertolli]

dennisjperkins at comcast.net wrote:
> I see that it did not take long to port some distros to the Eee:  Arch Linux, Ubuntu and Fedora have been ported.  As to which is best suited, that also depends on the user.  A lot of people who are comfortable with installing programs on Ubuntu and Fedora might not like Arch.
>
> EEe now has 1 GB RAM and an 8 GB solid state disk.  The price is also at $500-600.
>
> I find the SSD to be intriguing.  What is the projected maximum number of writes?  At least one Arch Linux document says that you should disable marking a file whenever it is accessed, never use journaling and to disable swap.  Someone else says that's ridiculous and that Asus does not do that with the preinstalled Xandros.
>   

AFAIK, they  have some kind of "read-only" partition unioned with a 
writable area.  So I think they are doing something different than just 
running a regular operating system on a flash drive.  Some ideas I've 
heard for solid state drives:

* The JFFS2 filesystem is designed for solid state drives and will 
reduce unnecessary writes

* Mount filesystems with noatime (like you said--don't mark files every 
time they're accessed), and there is nodiratime

* Use the kernel flag hda=flash (not sure what this does, but it exists!)

* Mount filesystems that you don't need to write to (/usr may be a good 
candidate) as read-only

* Mounting with "commit=600" reduces commits to the disk from every 5 
seconds to every 10 minutes

* You can use a small ramdisk for /tmp (/var too if you have enough memory)