Is Slackware Netbook (SD card) friendly?

TwinReverb · 01-15-2010, 06:44 PM

All,

Do any of you have experience to relate on how friendly (or not) Slackware is for Netbooks with SD card hard drives? I know there was some talk about how to make them this way by trying to limit how much writing was performed on them. I wanted to ask because I'm doing research (and yes Slackware is probably going to be VERY netbook friendly due to how it is built). I'm thinking leave the 4GB SD card in it and add a 32GB card so that maybe I can put / on the 4GB SD and "move" all write operations to the 32GB (/home) etc....

Thanks in advance!

Robert

affinity · 01-15-2010, 10:26 PM

I have the SSD model of the Aspire One, it runs Slackware fine. The write speeds are a bit slow, but this is true no matter what operating system you use.

cmk77 · 01-16-2010, 02:39 AM

I also have the aspire one with ssd. The read and write speed of the ssd is clearly the bottleneck, not the cpu or memory. Next time I'll make sure to choose a model with higher read/write speeds.

lupusarcanus · 01-16-2010, 02:46 AM

I have an AAO D-250, but I upgraded it to 320 GB 7200rpm 3.0 Gbps SATA.

The SD card reader is part of the Intel ICH7 motherboard and works very well, on nearly all distros I have tried (including Slack).

The real problem with my netbook is the Ethernet card. This thing sucks. It is placed in the case incorrectly and disconnects often. To get out-of-box kernel support for it you have to use kernel 2.6.31-14 or newer.

The wireless is pretty awesome though, it supports monitor mode and injection

Quote:

andrew@AAO:~$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GME Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GME Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) SATA AHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5001 Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)
andrew@AAO:~$ uname -a
Linux mylinuxbox 2.6.31-17-generic #54-Ubuntu SMP Thu Dec 10 16:20:31 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux

i haven't got around to opening it and fixing the Atheros Ethernet so thats why it's not listed. It sucks.

Hangdog42 · 01-16-2010, 06:23 AM

I'm running Slackware on a Dell Mini9 and that has a 16GB internal SSD. I did use ext2 as the file system to eliminate the read/write cycles from journaling and I don't have a swap partition. Of course I upgraded to 2GB of RAM, so I don't really ever need a swap partition. I also got a separate 16GB SDHC card for my data and do pretty much all my saving to that. I'm on my second one of those as the first one physically fell apart from all the moving between my netbook and main computer.

amiga32 · 01-16-2010, 07:02 AM

Like the guy above said, just use ext2 as your main file system. Journaling file systems will faster decrease the lifespan of a SSD.

mcnalu · 01-16-2010, 12:06 PM

I experimented with slackware 11 and 12 on a ssd drive and usb stick on a linutop 2.

I only had 1gb to play with so was careful what I installed - no kde for instance. I used ext2 for reasons mentioned as above.

Once installed I ran the find command with options to find most recently modified files (-mtime I think) and then altered fstab to make sure bits of the file system with regular writes were in memory. I think I ended up using tmpfs for /var and /tmp and used scripts (rc.local and _shutdown iirc) to save and restore contents of /var.

This worked quite well but I wiped it all a while ago to use it for something else.