Jamie's Random Musings
Various thoughts and adventures, including but not limited to Linux, Windows XP and Widows Vista, and assorted bits of hardware new and old.
Monday 19 January 2009, 2:47 PM
The Jaunty Jackalope is on the Way
- Linux kernel 2.6.28: Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex is based on the Linux kernel 2.6.27. Of course they are going to keep up with the latest stable kernel release.
- ext4 file system installation: This is reputed to be a significant improvement in file systems. I have installed Alpha3 to an ext4 filesystem, and it looks fine so far. There is one significant disadvantage, though. When you have a multi-boot Linux setup, as I do, the other (older) distributions are not able to understand the ext4 file system. This means that you can't mount or otherwise access from them, and you can't boot it if you have restored GRUB from one of them, as I described a week or so ago.
- X.Org server 1.6: While this should be an improvement in the long term, what it means right now is that the display server is not as stable and not as well integrated with various video drivers, so I haven't even tried installing in on the S2110 (ATI display) system.
- OpenOffice.org 3: No surprise here, I'm sure that Ubuntu 8.10 will have updated to OOo 3 long before Jaunty is released. But it's nice to see it here, anyway.
What has impressed me the most so far is how solid and stable this release appears at this early stage.
jw 19/1/2009
Update: Whoops, sorry, I was wrong about some older Linux distributions supporting the ext4 filesystem. What I have found so far is that Fedora 10 is able to recognize and mount ext4, but its GRUB still can't boot from ext4. Ubuntu 8.10 identifies it, but can't mount it or boot from it, openSUSE 11.1 can't mount it, but it appears that their GRUB recognizes it, which I find a bit odd, and Mandriva 2009.0 can't make heads nor tails of ext4 file systems. Interesting.
PreviousComments on this post
I've always used the XFS file system for my /home partition, because it's noticeably faster than ext3 (which I use for the root partition). Recent benchmarks done by Phoronix show that XFS compares well to ext4.
Mandriva 2009 can support ext4, but you'll need to mount it as type 'ext4dev', not type 'ext4'. It's only called 'ext4' since kernel 2.6.28, prior to 2.6.28 it was called 'ext4dev' to denote that it was still in development.
You can't use ext4 for the / partition (as the initrd doesn't have the driver to mount it), but you should be able to mount any other ext4 partition on 2009. The driver *is* there. diskdrake can also create ext4 partitions (if you look in the extended list of available types).
Oh, and it should be noted that Mandriva 2009 Spring will support ext4 for all partitions out of the box, as will Fedora 11 (in fact, F11 will default to ext4). Fedora has supported ext4 during installation if you boot with the 'ext4' kernel parameter since Fedora 8.
Thanks Adam, as always, for reading and commenting. I had not discovered that Mandriva 2009.0 could handle ext4, but I did see it in the announcement for 2009.1 Alpha. I was going to install that, and then write about it, but the current Alpha is only in the "Free" version, and I really prefer to wait on "One", as it invariably installs more smoothly on my laptops.
jw
