Linux compressed file-system???

exit3219 · 02-11-2006, 02:03 PM

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.

KimVette · 02-11-2006, 06:24 PM

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

kalleanka · 02-12-2006, 06:09 AM

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.

exit3219 · 02-12-2006, 11:16 AM

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.