I thought the Jaunty installer had ext4 as an option - I'm sure I saw that ...
There was a recent thread here re ext4 (do a search) - it cited some of Linus rants against it being merged. But he did (merge it) anyway.

And yes, grub needs to be updated for the bigger inode issue with ext3/4 nowadays - Ubuntu (now) and Fedora10 support this.

ext3 --> ext4 ?

ext4 testing is good for technically advanced user.
newbies stay with ext3 until ext4 is universal default.
this advice is still sound until today.

goodluck.

Agreed; remember Fedora is deliberately a bleeding edge distro to wide-scale test stuff that will later become RHEL etc.
This is why its not recommended for production systems.

Ext4? Hell, I still use ext2 with Puppy. I'm with the majority on this one. Wait until ext4 has been debugged and becomes the default fs for most major distros.

Cheers

Sorry people, maybe I just got carried away.

Even since Jaunty Jackolope came out, a lot of people, beginners and experts alike, go for upgrading to ext4.

So, ext4 is still not stable yet? Maybe I'll stick to ext3.

This is all you have said about why you might want to do this. If you thought that you ought to go with the crowd, you'd probably end up with some other operating system, and would that be a good idea? (hint nooooooo!)

Well, it depends what you mean by stable...

Obviously, two meanings are 'not undergoing frequent change' and 'crashes'. The first of those is inconvenient and the second can be really bad, so it does make a difference.

ext3 has clearly been around longer, so subtle bugs will have had time to be excised; deciding when to upgrade is always going to be a personal decision. If you just accept defaults you may not be consciously aware of taking a decision, but a decision does end up having been taken.

To add to salasi's comments, this may be true, but experts will have a valid reason and will be better prepared to deal with issues. On the other hand, beginners are most likely blindly upgrading for 'bragging rights' about running a bleeding edge system. However, as one reporter so poetically stated in a review, "Those rights tend to lose their glitter when an unknown bug trashes the system".

And yes, salasi, staying with defaults is a conscious decision, and I advise the same to anyone who doesn't have a valid reason to change.

Cheers

I recommend you see this:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...rounds-712905/

I personally use JFS or XFS. I use ext2 only for a /boot partition or maybe a USB stick. ext3 has rather mediocre performance, IMO. ext4 is mad by default.

I apologize that I made a fool of myself. After all I'm still confused about my "Linux identity" because of my lack of knowledge. It was unfortunate that I switched to Linux at a very inconvenient time in my life. Now I'm trying to restore what I lost. Once again, please forgive this mere novice.

To look at the question
(which is the question that you started off by asking), if I answered 'yes' would it have helped you? What about if i had answered 'no', would that have helped?

My feeling is that you wouldn't have even known what I meant. I could have meant 'Well, its OK, but it isn't really good' and answered with a yes, but I think that you would have jumped to a conclusion that I meant that it is actually good. So, the first thing that I am trying to walk you towards is to try to state something more about the context (is it good for a desktop machine would have a different answer from is it good for a server, for example), and the second thing is to try to gain some understanding of what, out of this 'upgrade', you might look at as an advantage (performance, stability, bragging rights, techie-ness??).

For example, in some benchmarking in a magazine (not always the best place for really reliable tech info, but we'll let that pass) there was a speed advantage for ext4 over ext3, but only if you use the more advanced configuration options, in this case extents.

So, one way of looking at this, if performance is your major hope from an upgrade, and if you aren't prepared to use the more advanced config options, there is no performance gain from using it so why would you even take a miniscule extra risk in order to get zero gain?

Other people may well take a 'techie-er' approach to this and tweaking their filesystem to get the last bit of performance out of it may be a source of satisfaction in itself and, for them, the advice to stick with a treid-and-tested system and a less, err, exciting, life may be just what they don't want. (You could say that this isn't rational, as you never get back the time that you spent tweaking, never mind the time that you spent crashing; if you have this point of view, this is just a non-argument, because techieness is, of itself, the goal.)

Another argument, and one that is detaining me for the moment, is that ext3 has a declared easy upgrade path to btrfs and ext4 doesn't (although one may come along anyway). As btrfs is Linux's answer to Sun's awesome ZFS (that's oversimplifying somewhat, but it will do as an overview) it sounds like btrfs is where I want to be eventually (or ZFS), then maybe I don't want to jump to ext4 as soon as I can, but look at btrfs and see how that is shaping up. Or, maybe, this is irrelevant and btrfs will be 'great' but not 'soon' and maybe I should just accept the less-easy upgrade path.

I don't think that you wanted life made that complicated, though...

OK, now this seems a bizarre comment

1. No, you haven't
2. We all have to learn, and asking questions without being embarrassed by what we don't know is part of that
3. I'd hope for a slightly more analytical approach to asking questions (and I think this should have been strung on the end of your previous post rather than the 'nearly a cross-post' approach that you have taken here, but that's something about which there can be arguments), but then it is part of the learning process

WillingToLikeLinux:

There is nothing to get embarrassed with asking questions. See the volume of responses above? That only shows how accommodating are the members here to help linux beginners. Remember that wisdom begins from questioning. Every wise man knows that.

Only, it is normal for some members here to fail making direct hit answers when the "question" is not very clear. That's normal. You may rephrase the question then if the answers don't hit what you desire.

With due respect I encourage you to continue experiencing gnu/linux system, and freely ask questions here.

BTW download the link for a well written tutorial hereunder my signature. Reading it will greatly help any newbie.

Goodluck.

I still use ext4, but one huge issue I have already encountered is data loss up to the previous boot. It happened when I was running an application and it started becoming really laggy, I had to kill it from another console. I only noticed the data loss when I continued my programming for my application, and found out some data I had worked on the whole day I had to redo! I just learn to use more frequent backups and sync often.