Finally! I have a working install of Linux 2.6.11-gentoo-r6 on a
Pentium II machine that I plan to use as a portable media center.
(Think of it as an iPod on steroids.)
But I've got a few issues, as the subject line says. Linux newbie
here, though I have done many unsuccessful Gentoo installations
before, so my feet are wet.
1.) I've got Reiser3.6 on my / partition (/dev/hda3, /mnt/gentoo).
I've also got Reiser3.6 on my /home partition (/dev/hda4,
/mnt/gentoo/home), but I'd like to try Reiser4 out. I hear that in
almost all cases, it's an extremely fast and safe file system. True,
it's a working beta version, but my /home partition is disposable (any
files I put there will be copied over from another computer, anyway,
so I've always got a live backup) so I think I'll jump in.
I found the Reiser4 emerge guide on the Gentoo forums, but that didn't
work for me. Is there any way to emerge Reiser4 support into my
kernel?
2.) This will be an embedded system, so how can I speed up the boot
process (after the BIOS hands control to GRUB)?
I've compiled a lot of stuff as modules so I can load and unload them
whenever necessary, so that cuts down on boot time. Things I've
noticed that take forever are "Calculating module dependencies...",
mounting Reiser3.6 partitions and DHCP detection (which I want).
3.) What's the Linux equivalent of DOS/Windows' autoexec.bat
(something to run commands on startup, namely "setterm -blank 0")?
4.) My USB key and/or a media card reader are sometimes plugged into
this computer, but not always. It's a hassle manually mounting them
every time I want to use it. Can I mount them in /etc/fstab even
though it won't always be present at boot-time? Here's what I've got,
commented out for now:
/dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdrive vfat noatime 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/cards/cf-md auto noatime 0 0
/dev/sdb2 /mnt/cards/sd-mmc auto noatime 0 0
/dev/sdb3 /mnt/cards/sm-xd auto noatime 0 0
/dev/sdb4 /mnt/cards/ms-mspro auto noatime 0 0
5.) And as far as my USB key is concerned, FAT32 is slow and
unjournaled. It sucks. ReiserFS is the greatest thing since NTFS as
far as I'm concerned, and I'd like to use that on my USB key, since
it's speedy, journaled and space-efficient.
Are there Windows/Mac OS 9/Mac OS X plugins for ReiserFS? I'd like to
put a small FAT partition on my key with just the plugins and a Reiser
partition spanning the rest for my data.
--
Colin
--
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