On Wednesday 31 January 2007, Volker Kuhlmann wrote: > On Wed 31 Jan 2007 12:32:02 NZDT +1300, Christopher Sawtell wrote: > > Interesting to note that a Gentoo install lasted longer than all others > > in the hands of a - computer wise - complete nitwit, simply because there > > is no GUI for said nitwit to mindlessly point and click on and thus > > stuff up his system. > > No, there are many command line programms instead to stuff up the same > things, and use of such programs is a necessity for basic maintenance. > There is no evidence that the lack of GUI tools was the cause for this > installation's longevity. Except that in this particular case said nitwit would never even consider using the command line to do anything without help, whereas he had no problem whatsever clicking his mouse more or less at random to attempt to do things.
> > The English man pages on my machine take up about 30 megs. That's a very > > small fry (< ~0.5% ) when you have 700 megs of CD disk space available. > > imho, any purported rescue disk which does not have a set of man pages > > for the rescue utilities available on the disk requires instant > > dismissal. > > You missed the point (again): on a live system which does not depend on the > use of the cdrom drive after boot (how many times do I need to repeat > this?), you have your total RAM, and that mustn't only hold the rootfs, but > also have space left to run some programs. Then make it 128MB RAM and it > doesn't take long to figure out that "a few megs" blows the (memory) > budget. Ah. I didn't appreciate your use of the words 'rescue disk' implied an all-in-ram system, like tom's root and boot or the BGrescue floppy disks. > There is a use for all these different harddiskless systems. > > > > > I couldn't even get anything with "fsck --help". > > > > eh? mine does. > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] /data/portage/distfiles $ /sbin/fsck.reiser4 --help > > Well I leave it to your analysis skills to figure out the reason for the > difference. Hint: 4. > > That begs the question of course why fsck --help was reported as being no > good. Some versions of fsck assume that if there are no options then the user wants all ext2 partitions checked. Madness imho, but we use an o/s which has evelved, rather than one which is designed, so we have to put up with the occasional disadvantage. > > > fs with having a new master block. In any case though you would need > > > the reiser 4(!) tools. > > > > Which were installed. > > And that is exactly how useful when they are installed on a filesystem > which has a dead superblock and therefore doesn't mount? Or are you pulling > legs here? No. Merely assuming that the root filesystem containing the fsck utilities is on a different partition from the one which needs repair. In spite of the trend to put all files in just one filesystem. I stick to the tried & true from yesteryear, particularly where /boot is concerned. imho you _should_ be able to boot cleanly a unix-like box into single user mode with only the root filesystem mounted. Most / many Linux distros fail that one, including Gentoo btw. -- CS
