Let's take another approach for a moment: What is it you don't like about Ext2, and/or what do you expect to gain by changing to a different file system? Are you looking for journaling? Compression? Changing for the sake of changing isn't practical

looking for somthing that has less overhead
its a very small disk and ext2 has a huge overhead
for example a ext2 floppy it 300k instead of 1400K and i have some more reasons

What are those other reasons? All factors should be considered. And have you done some research to determine which file system(s) will suit you best?

Ext* is a bit overkill for a floppy disk; I suggest using a FAT file system on floppies, or maybe consider making the Ext file system on them have a ridiculously small Inode-to-Block count (if it's even possible to make it small enough).
And, if you use floppies a lot, but also have a CDRW drive, you might consider using UDF-formatted CDRW discs instead, as they can be written to in successive sessions and once full, blanked and re-used. This has its own pros and cons when compared to floppy disks, but I have found the ~600Mib floppy CDRW 'disks' created by this process, to be pretty handy at times.

Sasha

I read our OP as someone who likes to tinker----I can identify: Starting at maybe age 10 I discovered that I could sometimes fix things by taking them apart and re-assembling. Of course, I never knew WHY something got fixed (or at least 1/2 the time NOT fixed).

I say "go for it"---try it and see.

Careful checking by you.

your right, i do like to tinker.

I just wanted to say sorry to the OP for my bad suggestion. I was answering the post right above it but I didn't explain the better option. However, my current signature line offers that warning ;P.

5+ gigs is a lot of data to back up with 'cp' x.x yikes!...

Unless of course your /usr and everything unessential to boot is on a different partition... my '/' partition is only 340MB of data aside from /boot which is on another partition...

Even if /var is included on your / partition, that should still be under 1 gig.

Look at tune2fs. A certain percentage of disk space is reserved for the root user. You can change this, possible achieving your end goal. The default reserved-block-percentage is 5%.

@lumak its ok you dont need to apoligize
heres the output of df
/var /home /tmp /bin /sbin /boot /etc all on /