[Techtalk] Mandrake 8.1 vs 8.2

[Tabatha Persad]

On Fri, 2002-08-02 at 21:11, Poppy wrote:
> This is interesting... I've had a couple of power outages, and too many
> "oh, this program crashed either X or Gnome or something, and I can't
> recover b/c I can't get in to kill the program that was running" where I
> wind up having to cycle the power. I'd heard that 8.2 was pickier about
> hardware, and got the impression that it was less stable overall. Are
> you not finding this to be the case? I might think about upgrading
> (again! - I've gone from MDK 7.2 to 8.1 already this year) at some point
> if ext3 recovers better from improper shutdowns.

Hi Poppy,

Ext2 (8.1) is not a journaling file system.  Ext3 (8.2) uses a journal
to track changes that are being made to the disk, in the event that
there is a failure, such as power.  The OS can use the journal to either
complete the changes if they'd already been written to the journal, or
to remove the changes if they hadn't been completed.

Because of this, I've had more stability than I had with 8.1.  It's been
about 2 months now on 8.2, and I haven't had to do a single network
restart, and I haven't walked in to find fsck failing to repair my disk
after the intermittent power outages we've experienced.

> Actually, truth be told, I'd rather figure out why it's crashing on me
> and get that fixed... all I've been able to do is figure out what I can
> predict will kill it, and just avoid doing that. Which means I can't
> access my work email from home unless I boot into windows.

I backed up my home directory onto another machine on the network and
then did a clean install of 8.2.  I had already reinstalled 8.1 about 2
or 3 times, and wasn't sure I'd be happy with 8.2, but it's been great.
Like I said, it even took care of that network restarting issue (I think
my NIC driver was flaky), so overall, 8.2 has been pretty good for me!

> On Fri, 2002-08-02 at 09:48, Tabatha Persad wrote:
> > Further to David's email, if you do end up deciding that Mandrake is the
> > distro for you, you may want to consider a higher version.  I was very
> > happily motoring along with Mandrake 8.1 not all that long ago, but 8.1
> > only has ext2 filesystem.  What does this mean?  Well, every time I had
> > an intermittent power outage (don't ask why, we don't know either, maybe
> > there are squirrels in the transformers outside!), the Mandrake file
> > system would have more difficulty recovering from the sudden restarts. 
> > With the ext3 filesystem in 8.2, I don't have this problem anymore.  It
> > had gotten to where I had to reinstall 8.1 a couple times because of the
> > file system corruption.  Finally I went to 8.2, and now that doesn't
> > happen (nor do I have to restart my network services due to the flaky
> > nic, something got fixed in 8.2!).

-- 
Tabatha Persad
Web: www.merlinmonroe.com
Linux Documentation Project Editor (http://www.tldp.org)
Gnu Writing Movement Contributor (http://gwm.gnu.org)
Linux Counter Area Manager US:wa (http://counter.li.org)