Linux compressed file-system???
 

I'm looking for ways to fit Ubuntu on a 5GB partition. I suppose there are lots of files on my hard disk which I don't use (like /usr/share/doc/*). I'd compress them manually (tar.bz2), but I don't know how dpkg will react to that.

So my question is: is there any compressed file-system option for Linux (like NTFS compression on that other OS)?

Googling hasn't been much help.
Thanks.

Not exactly; you CAN compress on a per-file basis on ext2 if I recall correctly.

Note: before submitting I just googled for "chattr compress ext2" and found that I was correct in recalling that ext2 can support compression, on the fly even. You may have to patch the kernel but it's not a big deal. Check out:

http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue18/e2compr.html
http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Syste...ion-1509.shtml
http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/lin...07.2/0476.html

puppy linux does somthing like that.

http://www.goosee.com/puppy/

download puppy-unleashed and expand the tarball and in the script createpuppy you find out how to do it.

Thanks for the replies!

As for the links you gave me, AFAICS these tools are either old (ext2 not ext3) or in an alpha status of development. I don't wanna go that far.

Doesn't Puppy Linux use the same live-cd compression scheme as Knoppix or DSL uses? I don't think that's appropriate for a hard-disk installed distro. Thanks for the idea, though. Maybe I'll come back to it later.