[Gllug] Debian file system

[NorthLondon John]

Hi,

I've spent much of the last two days installing Debian on an old 
(266mhz, 64mb ram) laptop, using the 4th beta of the new installer.
It's been a horrendous experience, and if I hadn't spent so much time 
on it, and hadn't got most things working, I'd dump it for slackware.

The last hardware problem I have is with the cdrom. This is acessible 
by root, but not by any users. It's not a permissions problem - the 
error I get when trying, eg, to play an audio cd, is:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on dev/hdc,
or too many mounted file systems

In the course of looking into this, I found some oddities with the 
filesystem:
1:  /dev/hdc has two entries in the fstab - /cdrom and /media/cdrom

2: fstab has swap on /dev/hda5 - 165mb according to system monitor; 
kdiskfree doesn't show this, but has tmpfs mounted at /dev/shm (size: 
30.4mb, free 30.4mb, Full% 0.0%). What is tmpfs? Is it equivalent to 
swap? Why don't the numbers add up?

Also, it's extremely slow. I don't expect to break the land speed 
record on old hardware, but performance is far worse than Slack or even 
Win98. I can't believe this is Deb's natural speed, so I presume 
there's some misconfiguration, or at least some tricks for 
optimization. Where do I start looking?

PS: Using kernel 2.6.3 - if that's relevent. (2.4 screwed things up, 
for some unknown reason.)

TIA

John



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