What about the people who install openSUSE on a laptop? or on a home PC that is shut down every night? Are we right in expecting them to do tune2fs? An experienced user might not mind, but what about the new users? I understand why Novell chose to set ext3 as the default file system, and I know that if I prefer I can pick any other one from the list when I do my custom partitioning.... but where does that leave our new users... people new to Linux? ...people who have no clue about ext3, Reiser, etc.
Are laptops less susceptible to filesystem corruption?
:-) certainly not. Possibly more so due to the more thumps and bumps a laptop has to endure. I named laptops simply because they are typically booted up/rebooted much more often than your typical server (which can go months or even years without a restart). With regular restarts... possibly even several per day, a laptop user is going to bump into the fsck after X number of boots thing a lot sooner. If this person is a new user.. new to Linux, they are going to be rather annoyed and frustrated (personal experience through a very heated phone call from a friend who had exactly this problem/experience with his laptop). Usually (in my experience) a laptop user needs a fast boot up... openSUSE is reasonable most of the time... until ext3 does its fsck.
It's never been a problem for me. But then again, I don't put everything into one huge 80 GB filesystem. Several smaller filesystesm will fsck faster than the same amount of disk space in one large partition.
Right, but you are not an inexperienced user. ext3 is not a problem for those of us who are long time Linux users... we know about ext3's forced fsck. We can plan for it. We know how to partition our drives so as to reduce the impact of the fsck. We know about the other file systems and can and often do select other ones when the job requires it. We can go tinker with tune2fs until we are happy with the setup.... But... I am not talking about the need to solve an issue for experienced users. I am talking about the new users... people new to Linux. openSUSE defaults (with a well discussed reason) to ext3. That is fine. But ext3 has a "gotcha" in the form of the mandatory fsck. This is not currently handled nicely. It is a bit of a surprise to new users when their computer running a _default_ openSUSE suddenly decides that this particular boot is the time to do a check. There is at least one enhancement bug open on this (discussed elsewhere in this thread)... maybe we can improve things a bit for the new users :-) C -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org