As has already been noted, ext3 is the choice for the leaders in stable Linux environments.

Regarding your swap size, unless the processors are really old, I think you will find 256-512 MB of swap is plenty

Use an analysis tool such as gnome-system-monitor to evaluate your swap usage over time. Just a thought to help you squeeze a little more out of your hard drives.

yes but i find the writting to disc every 5 secs is putting me off a bit, i still have time to decide b4 slack 11 comes out - i will see what happens then

i use reiser or etx2

ye i think im going to to stick with ext2 myself - just need to figure out the command to trim the 5% it reserves

It would be nice if Pat included support for XFS and JFS in the default boot kernel for installation along with ext2/3 and reiser, rather than having to boot xfs.s or jfs.s. I myself would like to see how Slack performs on either of those two without having to mkinitrd when using xfs.s or jfs.s.

Reiser is only for those who are using a UPS. If you pull the plug on a Reiser system 1 to 3 times you will have lost your data. This is just the upshot of the inexpensive hardware we PC users have. It is not a knock against the file system. I discovered this the hard way.

I have never lost data on ext2 file systems in 10 years, but as soon as I tried Linspire I had it immediately, I thought that this was Linspire's issue, but no, as soon as Slackware started using Reiser as default then my Slackware boxes became delicate as well. When to ext3 and it is the best of both worlds. Stable ext2 base and journaling as well.

To reduce reserved space via tune2fs use -m.

I use ext3. I have been from the start have never had any issues with data lose. My servers have survived several power loss with no data loss. Now all servers have UPS. Even my laptop uses ext3. It's tested tried and true. I had used reiserfs but had data issues with some files that went bad so I switched back to ext3.

A few things:

@frodo:
I've never heard about Reiser being for machines with a UPS. Could you elaborate a little?

I was debating switching my / to ext3 and making my home partition either Reiserfs or XFS. Until I stumbled on this thread I kinda had it in my head that when Slackware 11 came out I'd have an ext3 formatted / and a reiserfs formatted /home. I still think I'll format / as ext3 but I have no plans on getting a UPS anytime soon and I'm hoping that is not really the case about reiserfs.

I have more small files right now than I do large ones and not one file approaches the 1GB mark. I was basing my choice of reiserfs on that but XFS has been interesting me greatly. I read through those links that cking posted and XFS has taken my attention now. So I'm considering changing over to XFS for my /home. Any thoughts about XFS and small files?

@Carpo:
You edited your original post and you were able to put the reason right in the edit notification:How did you get the reason right in the edit notification???

and there was me thinking i had a bit of time to go before i had to make the decision before slack 11 came out , last question has anyone have had or heard of a ext3 fs being completely stuffed due to a power loss killing the journal (or any other such issue that has caused it to be wiped) - i still have time to decide while i get the dvd ;p

ext3, hands down. I've practically killed my data 3 times over and ext3 has been able to get it back each time. It is amazingly rock-solid.

use huge.s - or what ever its called - it should be in there

guess its ext3 for htpc machine and prob ext2 for laptop - thanks for all you replys

I have ReiserFS on all my machines in the last few years, and I never had any problems. I have no UPS and I never lost my data.

XFS is for big files, but I never found information "what is a big file". 100MB? 1GB? 4.4GB (DVD iso)?

M.

i have both reiser and ext3 fs on a bunch of different computers. we frequently get power crashes here (b/c the utility company sucks - they must be running that grid on windoze ) and i don't have a UPS. i've been intending to get one but haven't gotten around to it yet, mostly because i would actually need a couple. but i never lost any data from the hard crashes on either filesystem, luckily. overall i prefer the speed of reiserfs, but i like the feeling of stability from ext3. i'll probably use reiser for the extra speed since i'm installing 11 on a laptop, but i'm slowly converting all my desktop filesystems to ext3.

I am not saying that having a UPS is the recommendation of the Reiser folks, just that the file system cannot take losing power on the PC. If any of my friends needed to use it for the speed, then I would recommend that they not use it without a UPS on the the system in question.

I would refer you to Theodore Tso's comments on the issue at:

http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Filesystems/reiserfs.html

And it is not a ReiserFS only issue, but a PC hardware issue. I have actually built systems to pull the power plug out and test this and I find it to be true, at least with my Compaq, HP, IBM, Dell, Microtel, and white box clone systems.

I am not saying that using these file systems is bad, just that if the data is important use a UPS.

Frodo