Hi Are there any utilities built into the Linux AAO (defrag etc.) ? Many thanks
For Linux: there is not built in defrag utility. Purely because fragmentation in Linux is different to the same process in Windows. Due to different type of format fragmentation is not that big under Linux and there is no need for such a utility/software... For Windows: It is exactly the same like for normal desktop. To have good utility you have to add this separately...
You _can_ defragment the ext2 filesystems the One uses, but I'm fairly sure you'll need to do it with the filesystem unmounted (i.e., by booting from a CD or something like that). As others have said, it's unlikely to be helpful. Rudimentary checking of the filesystem integrity is supposed to be done (using fsck or similar) as part of the boot process. I have no idea if the One does this or not. It probably should, but since the whole boot process is silenced by default, I have no idea what it would do if it found an error. fsck can be forced to run on a mounted filesystem, but I've always thought that's a good way to break it. To be honest, I don't normally worry about any of this on a Linux system. My approach is to keep good backups and, if a filesystem gets too broken to use, reinstall the OS. I've had to do this, maybe, twice or three times in the last ten years.
I'm not at my AA now and can't remember what fstab looks like on it. If the sda1 line ends in 1, fsck will be run automatically after a given number of boots on that drive. If the line ends in 0 then that drive/partition won't be automatically fsck'd. Cheers.
At least that what it says in Linux textbooks But I'm not sure the plumbing is present in the Acer start-up scripts. Of course, I'm not sure it _isn't_ present either -- it's just that I'm not sure how a system that has a completely silent, non-interactive boot would cope with doing a disk check at boot time. Would the screen just stay blank for a minute or two? Or would it drop back to a console display? And given the intended market of the unit, would the Linux implementors think that the user would know what do do about a message like ``Duplicate inode #443323223. Fix *(y/n)?'' Just speculating, really.
I guess I was too, as I normally just shut the lid and place the 'puter in sleep mode. So, I have yet to witness an automatic fsck (if one can witness it like you say ). Guess eventually we'll find out. Cheers.
OK, back on my AA and it looks like auto fsck is not turned on. [user@localhost ~]$ sudo dumpe2fs -h /dev/sda1 | grep -i 'mount count' audit_log_user_command(): Connection refused dumpe2fs 1.40.2 (12-Jul-2007) Mount count: 52 Maximum mount count: 38 So the drive is set to be fsck'd at 38 boots, but the mount count is already up to 52. This situation is troubling and would mean one would need to boot with an external live Linux and run fsck against sda1 manually to check the filesystem. Can't see the ordinary user ever doing that. Cheers.
OK, now I'm confused as apparently the drive was checked the other day ... [user@localhost ~]$ sudo dumpe2fs -h /dev/sda1 | grep -i 'last checked' audit_log_user_command(): Connection refused dumpe2fs 1.40.2 (12-Jul-2007) Last checked: Sun Aug 17 09:39:46 2008 So why hasn't the mount count been zeroed out to restart the count? At least, that is how I thought it was supposed to work. Cheers.
Well, I've looked hard and I can't see anything in the boot scripts that would cause fsck to get done. The logic is there in rc.sysinit, but I don't see any way for rc.sysinit to get run. In inittab it looks like initialization is done using a script /etc/rc.d/rc.S, which has a very truncated startup compared to a `normal' Linux distribution. There doesn't seem to be an obvious way to check your disk apart from booting from a CD or something. I don't know how big a deal that is -- the 8Gb unit can't store a lot of data anyway, and if the worst comes to the worst you can just restore the whole thing from a CD, I suppose. But it's more of a big deal on the hard-disk units, I suppose. I wonder if they behave the same way?
