F9 for Eeepc

Jon Nettleton jon.nettleton at gmail.com
Tue Jan 29 00:54:17 UTC 2008


On Jan 28, 2008 7:20 PM, Orion Poplawski <orion at cora.nwra.com> wrote:
> Jonathan Underwood wrote:
> > On 25/01/2008, John (J5) Palmieri <johnp at redhat.com> wrote:
> >> On Fri, 2008-01-25 at 15:39 -0700, Orion Poplawski wrote:
> >>
> >>> - Flash drive.  Want to minimize writes.  One attempt (eeedora) uses the
> >>> ext2 filesystem rather than ext3.  Does that help?  Are there things to
> >>> take from stateless projects for minimizing writes to /var?
> >>>
> >> jffs2 is what we use on the OLPC, there is another FS in the works that
> >> is a lot better for large flash though.  I forget the name.  On modern
> >> flash you don't have to worry about rewrites as much though since the
> >> hardware randomizes writes.  What kills the disk on older flash drives
> >> is writing to the journal in Ext3 and writing to the FAT on Fat disks.
> >> Both of those are fixed locations which stress out a small portion of
> >> the disk.  Each flash device has only so many writes per bit before that
> >> bit dies.  By distributing it over the whole disk it takes a lot longer
> >> to destroy.  I would check the specs on the flash drive that came with
> >> the Eee.  Another thing you might want to do is not have a swap
> >> partition.  Apps run fine without swap, you just might run into OOM more
> >> frequently.
> >>
> >
> > The eeepc drive has a FTL, so these drives don't appear as flash
> > drives to the OS, so jffs, yaffs, logfs and the like aren't applicable
> > to the eeepc, as I understand it.
>
> The drive appears as a standard IDE drive.  dmesg reports the drive as a
> "SILICONMOTION SM223AC".   Google doesn't seem to turn up much other
> than users' reports on their eeePC :-).
>

For other eeepc users I just wanted to mention that I hacked on
devilspie to include matching on the geometry attributes of a window.
Long story short you can use it now to say if a window is taller than
480 pixels you can either set it to resize smaller or maximize
vertically.

This still doesn't work for dialog's yet, I am looking at gtk and a
few other places that I might hack around fixes to make them fit on
the small resolution better.

Jon




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