Hi there,

I'm just about to load a new version of VectorLinux (5.8) on my laptop, but would like some recommendations regarding the filesystem to use.
Since its quite modest (P3 450mhz, 128mb ram, 40gb hdd) what would be the most eficient filesystem that would provide the best battery life but also perform well.
I've seen threads where is was mentioned that journaling filesystems are not the best for laptops, but I also don't want to sacrifice speed. Also, would using a journal-less filesystem like ext2 require me to defragment the drive periodicaly?

Thanks in advance!

Use ext3. The performance characteristics of the different filesystems make a difference on heavily loaded network servers, but using an alternate filesystem on a P3 laptop is not likely to give you any significant benefit at all.

Note that by default ext3 only journals metadata, and you have to specifically enable full journalling, so you only lose performance to file journalling if you actually choose to switch it on.

Probably the best thing to do here is to get more RAM, and if you want, use a lightweight desktop environment like XFCE, so that the machine does not need to use the swap partition on the hard disk. And obviously, set the power management functions to conserve the battery as well.