[clue-talk] Asus EEe and Linux distros

[dennisjperkins at comcast.net]

How much of this is necessary?  Older technology, like CompactFlash, has a maximum number of writes.  You might go way over that, but that is supposed to be the lowest maximum.  I don't know if they have solved this issue, or if that number is now so high that it won't affect most people.  Journalling, etc, on the other hand, writes to disk more often than simple user activity does.

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Angelo Bertolli <angelo at freeshell.org>
> 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)
> 
> 
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