Re: Slackware 2.3 CD-ROM

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

   Puratofomu in Akihabara now has the July 1995 release of Walnut
   Creek's v2.3 Slackware 2 CD-ROM set.

Do you know how far they (Walnut Creek) lag the originals?  Two years
ago their Simtel CD lagged Simtel by about 6 months.  What was the
price for the CD set?

   I also picked up an 810 meg hard disk for 24,500 yen.  Right now there

Is that SCSI or IDE?  Not a bad price; it's about what Dirt Cheap
drives was asking for Quantum SCSI drives in March Computer Shopper.
Western Digital was a little cheaper.  It's interesting; drive prices
are now more or less linear in capacity and SCSI is only a little more
expensive than IDE; used to be that SCSI was 50% more expensive (in
the range the you could get IDE drives, up to about 500MB), and in the
SCSI 500MB+ range you paid about $350 for the box and $1/MB.  Now SCSI
is a 15--25% premium, and you pay nothing for the box and $0.30/MB.
Yikes.

   I've noticed that it takes a while for the login prompt to appear when
   I telnet over the ethernet.  Has anyone else seen this?  The general

Do you use IP or domain addressing?  Where are your nameservers,
gateways, and routers?  Also the first packet or so is much slower, do
a 'ping -c 10' to check it out.  Of course, I don't notice the
difference between 1.2ms and 5.3ms, do you?

   throughput seems okay.  Hey, even g++ works now....   One thing I noticed
   is that TeX got humongous...  I didn't really want those Klingon fonts..
   ;-)

The dollar cost of TeX's disk space is a physical constant, you know,
like the speed of light.  With disk space getting cheap so fast, TeX
has to get bigger ;-)

If you wanna see *big*, you should check out the Wadalabs Type 1 Kanji
fonts.  (I think they are at ftp.cs.wisc.edu in /pub/ghostscript/fonts
or some such.)  Boy are they pretty, though.  (Unfortunately thay have
not been fully integrated into Ghostscript yet :-( .)

   A lot of things seem much cleaner.  Just to be safe, I made the root
   partition 1024 sectors.. (or was that cylinders??)..   Is there
   any problem with going over 1024 on the root partition?

What in the world is Patrick doing?  I thought Slackware was FSSTND-
compliant!  Even on a single-user system, Slackware ought to ask you
if you want an industrial strength file system.  But if you want to do
that, OK.  I believe that technically speaking the problems with >1024
cylinder disks have long been fixed, although setup or fdisk may still
issue a warning.

IMHO, what you want to do is have your root partition quite small,
with maybe 10MB at most.  This allows you to back it up easily, and
even make a complete mirror on a separate partition.  (Use dd.)  If
the mirror is a physical partition, you can set it bootable with any
fdisk.  This allows you to get your linux system back up from the HD
quickly in the event that your regular root partition somehow gets
trashed.

Even though I only have a few users, most of them me ;-), I prefer a
setup where /usr, /home, and /var all have their own partitions.  For
my Internet-visible archive machine, /WWW needs a separate partition
too (people have dumped N x 10MB files into my /home/ftp/incoming on
occasion..., and wu-ftpd won't let you put incoming on a separate
partition; it won't follow symlinks after the initial chroot).  The
rationale for this separation is that overflowing the partition with
/usr on it is a horrible thing; you don't want to tromp on the system
software (what typically happens is that recently edited configuration
files disappear).  But /usr doesn't grow very often; except when
you're building a new emacs, it's hard to imagine needing more than
10MB free space there.

Keeping /home, /var, and /WWW on separate partitions keeps real users,
daemons, and anonymous users from stepping on each others' toes
(especially those warez d00dz, who are often more than a little
malicious).  If you expect to get mail-bombed, you might want to put
/var/spool/mail on its own partition, too.  (It's pretty much the only
thing in /var that grows randomly, the growth rate of error and
message files is pretty consistent.)

This is my personal preference, even for a single user machine.  For
more rationale and details, read the Linux File System Standard:

[from the FSSTND-FAQ]
Q)  What's the current status of the FSSTND?

A)  As of this writing, (Oct 9, 1994), Linux FSSTND 1.2 has been
released as an interim draft, and is available for anonymous FTP
from tsx-11.mit.edu in /pub/linux/docs/linux-standards/fsstnd.
PostScript, dvi, and ascii text versions are available.

The FSSTND discussion mailing list is "linux-fsstnd@example.com"; if you
wish to participate in future expansion of the standard, you can
subscribe to this list by sending mail to "listserv@example.com", with the
body of "add linux-fsstnd".
[end excerpt]

Despite the "interim status," it's pretty much full-grown for typical
single-user systems now.  If you aren't going to be mounting NFS all
over the place or using IFS to mount an HD on top of your Slackware
CDROM which is mounted on /usr, the FSSTND isn't going to change much
from your point of view.  OTOH, looks like Craig at least is into that
kind of thing.  :-)

BTW, 1024 sectors is 512KB, awful small for any partition :-)

Steve