[Nottingham] Re: Dell taking Linux seriously now? (Cam)

[Jim Moore]

You wrote:
<snip>
> Having just bought a Dell laptop for about £400, I wonder how much I
> could have saved by leaving out the Vista license? Said laptop is going
> to be running Fedora 7
>
> -Cam
>

Considering the fact that last October, Dell bought a job lot of Vista OEM 
licenses (30 million of them at six US Dollars each), not a great deal. OK, 
Dell will NEVER sell thirty million Vista-equipped systems, but that's the 
only way Microsoft will let them go at that price. Screw the independent who 
just does not have that kind of buying power. They did exactly the same with 
XP, and ME, and 2K, and 98/SE, and 95, and 3.1...


Oh, while I'm going through this block...

>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Wed, 02 May 2007 13:26:43 +0100
> From: Martin <martin at ml1.co.uk>
> Subject: [Nottingham] Depth first or breadth first for faster backups?
> To: NLUG <nottingham at mailman.lug.org.uk>
> Message-ID: <46388383.5030404 at ml1.co.uk>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> OK Folks,
>
> A question for tonight:
>
> For traversing through directories and files, what should be the faster:
>
> Walking through the directories and files going depth first or breadth
> first?
>

Depth first, if I understand you correctly: the local FS writes folder 
structures /then/ writes the object data. Linux nonjournalling filesystems 
are fairly faster than FAT32 anyway, and the kernel is generally faster when 
dealing with FAT32 than the NT kernel when it writes to that filesystem. 
Which is why I use Linux for blockshifting whenever I can. Great timesaver 
(shaves 10-25% off the time compared with NT).

> I would guess that just doing a simple "dd" would be quickest and
> minimise HDD head movements... But then that's only useful if you're
> near 100% utilisation and you're going to mount the dd copy as an image!
>

If you want to minimise head movement, go the whole hog and get a sector 
cloner like Acronis TrueImage. 15GB across USB2.0 in less time than it takes 
to nuke a chicken.

>
> On a related theme:
>
> What utilities do people use for their backups?
>

I use my own DBFS design loosely based on HPFS but with network scalability 
and full metability which uses a distributed model to clone its own indices 
across any connected node. It's a bit of a cheat really, because I have it 
layered over ReiserFS on my notebook, and mirroring to a RAID6 server which 
synchs when I get my notebook home and connected to the LAN.

>
> See ya later,
>
> Cheers,
> Martin
>
>