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**JosephBlanx** · 05-31-2003

I have an old compaq presario 5660: p2 450mhz, 384mb ram running on windows xp and a ntfs 12gb hard drive. I am impressed by what ntfs has done for speed and stability, and yeah xp is pretty. What I am looking for is to migrate to perhaps linux. Can anyone recommend a Linux system that would at the least meet the stability and speed of ntfs? As far as OS I only web browse, email, and play various media. So I am not concerned with super video card sucking visuals. But I am concerned with security and privacy... otherwise NOT microsoft. Just looking for a direction to go. I'm not as retarded as I probably sound about pc's, but am new to linux. Any advice is supremely appreciated.

**craig_mcd** · 05-31-2003

I dont have much experience with XP, the short amount of time I have used it didnt leave me very impressed. I dont think the ntfs filesystem is great, I think the journaling filesystems (ext3, reiserfs, xfs etc) do a much better job.

As for which distie to use, they should all provide journaling filesystems.
Red Hat, Mandrake and Suse are good choices for a beginner.

**Dolda2000** · 05-31-2003

I can't say that I'd give much for NTFS, either. Microsoft's caching code still sucks in comparison to Linux, and, yes, ext3, reiserfs and xfs all do better jobs and give more functionality than NTFS. The only thing that UNIX is lagging behind in is, of course, file ACLs, but you don't really need them _that_ often.
And I have seen an NTFS filesystem crash just because of an unclean shutdown, even though it's supposed to be journalling. I have never ever seen an ext3 filesystem crash like that. I haven't used reiserfs or xfs much enough to say the same for them, but I'd be surprised if they did crash just because of that.
If only you need to configure your system correctly, you'll reach entirely new areas of security and privacy; levels that are completely unreachable with Winbloze.

**craig_mcd** · 05-31-2003

Not any more, acl's for ext3 will be in the 2.6.x kernel and currently are in the 2.5.x and I think you can patch 2.4.x. xfs already has acl's, not sure about reiserfs.

**JosephBlanx** · 05-31-2003

well then, I'm also thinking about dual booting on my hard drive. I'm looking for compatability with 1998 hardware, which is a little hard. But I am excited about a MS free desktop eventually!

**Dolda2000** · 05-31-2003

Except if you have any kind of unusual hardware, it should all be supported. A big problem is if you have a WinModem that you want to be supported. That's not always possible.

And, yes, I did know that ACL support was underway, but even if it's supported in the kernel, do GNU's userspace tools really support them?

**craig_mcd** · 05-31-2003

The userspace commands do exist. Heres a llink.

**bpark** · 05-31-2003

Perhaps he was impressed that NTFS is better than FAT32? When I defrag in Win2K, it's so much more faster than it used to be in FAT32 under Windows 98. Of course ext3 is the better system out of all of the file system mentioned here so far but NTFS is definetly an improvement over FAT32.

**Dolda2000** · 06-01-2003

Yes, I believe that is what he meant. And, yes, NTFS is an enormous improvement over FAT32. Did you know it even has support for hard linking and multiple streams? FAT32 is among the stupidest things I've ever seen, actually. I can't believe that they haven't replaced it until this recently. The fragmentation is hideous, and the FAT technique in itself is just unspeakably stupid. If it wasn't for the caching, it would be so slow that it wouldn't even be thinkable. To store file attributes in the directory entries just begs for filesystem corruption.
Still, NTFS just doesn't match UNIX filesystems in functionality, and when it comes to the performance between Linux's filesystem code and Win32's filesystem code, well... do I even have to mention it?
A Windows system drives me nuts every single time I try to use it. Even Windows XP doesn't even come close to Linux's stability and performance (surprise!). And the functionality is just terrible. If it doesn't hang before I can carry out the task that I was supposed to do, it still always does something to drive me nuts. I will never, ever go back to Windows again, that's for sure. Even if Windows would outperform Linux in both stability and performance (which, needless to say, isn't ever going to happen), I would still not go back, since there will still be so much more functionality in Linux.

**Dolda2000** · 06-01-2003

Btw., craig, do you know if there is to make this work over NFS as well?

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