# How To Move Your Linux Systems To ext4



## praka123 (May 11, 2008)

> _"Ext4 is the latest in a long line of Linux file systems, and it's likely to be as important and popular as its predecessors. As a Linux system administrator, you should be aware of the advantages, disadvantages, and basic steps for migrating to ext4. This article explains when to adopt ext4, how to adapt traditional file system maintenance tool usage to ext4, and how to get the most out of the file system."_


 -via slashdot
*linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/06/1650257

*www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-ext4/?ca=dgr-lnxw01LinuxFSext4&S_TACT=105AGX59&S_CMP=GR

Now the Question is who's gonna try it at its current state ?


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## Sykora (May 11, 2008)

afaik Fedora 9 has support for ext4, have to wait and see.


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## praka123 (May 11, 2008)

hot news!as per one site below, fedora 9 released,but yet not came onto their web page 
may be presently syncing all mirrors with cd and dvd images of fedora 9 
*www.linux-noob.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=3455


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## MetalheadGautham (May 12, 2008)

mear sub-mortals like me with an 80 GB HDD have little or no use for this file system that has all features fit for futuristic servers. The undelete option looks good, but I hope it is a root only option. And a delete deleted file option(by filling deleted file's space with zeros) will also be welcome.


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## subratabera (May 12, 2008)

AFAIK its releasing on Tuesday.

*fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/9/Schedule


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## praka123 (May 12, 2008)

^yeah,but you know,they need to sync all servers with release ISO.so,unofficially it is released 
you may grab a ISO


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## MetalheadGautham (May 12, 2008)

praka123 said:


> ^yeah,but you know,they need to sync all servers with release ISO.so,unofficially it is released
> you may grab a ISO


WTF ! Fedora 7 and 8 DVDs I got from PC World and LFY respectively just flew by. Time indeed runs. 

PS: you going to grab its torrent or its direct link ? and when do you think we shall download it ? I am thinking of waiting for LFY instead.


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## praka123 (May 12, 2008)

well,I am not gonna try now.I am pretty much satisfied by Debian.

torrents may be available at linuxtracker.org etc 

Fedora 9 will definitely give a good competition to Ubuntu.


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## MetalheadGautham (May 12, 2008)

praka123 said:


> well,I am not gonna try now.I am pretty much satisfied by Debian.
> 
> torrents may be available at linuxtracker.org etc
> 
> Fedora 9 will definitely give a good competition to Ubuntu.


but ubuntu hardy has had cool speed boosts compared to gutsy. so its better for slower machines like ours((x)))


PS: will taring my /home directory and burning it to a DVD, when I currently run feisty, then install hardy, but this time, make a seperate 10 GB /home partition out of the alloted 17 gb for my current linux partition(excluding swap), then copying the contents of the tarred /home to the new /home transfer my feisty settings to my hardy ?


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## praka123 (May 12, 2008)

^well,it will work mostly.do use "gconf-cleaner" later 

Fedora 9 is now very fast(as per forums) and uses the "upstart" init replacement daemon as in ubuntu. wait and watch


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## subratabera (May 12, 2008)

Now I really need a new harddisk .

BTW, Fedora 9, here I come.


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## MetalheadGautham (May 12, 2008)

praka123 said:


> ^well,it will work mostly.do use "gconf-cleaner" later


why ?(the gconf-cleaner part)


praka123 said:


> Fedora 9 is now very fast(as per forums) and uses the "upstart" init replacement daemon as in ubuntu. wait and watch


woweee! then is there any way to get dpkg onto fedora ?

till then ubuntu it is for me


PS: if fedora rivals ubuntu in speed, are you concidering replacing ubuntu with fedora as your eye-candy OS, while retaining debian as your primary one ?


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## praka123 (May 12, 2008)

well,currently I am experimenting archlinux  small and fast(gnome or kdemod for fast).

gconf-cleaner -cleans obsolete conf files in ur ~/ directory those "." files.


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## MetalheadGautham (May 12, 2008)

praka123 said:


> well,currently I am experimenting archlinux  small and fast(gnome or kdemod for fast).


Haven't you finished with arch yet ? I suggest you move to gentoo and start rivaling mehulved.
Or go for FreeBSD + Debian, an excellent Linux + BSD combo for our forum's OSS mascot 
slackware ain't too bad an ultra light weight distro either


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## subratabera (May 12, 2008)

Ubuntu (or any other Linux) can perform better with very minor tweaks. e.g. Preload, disabling unnecessary services, reducing swapiness etc. But Fedora is really faster than ubuntu (at least the live image) as per my own experience.


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## MetalheadGautham (May 12, 2008)

subratabera said:


> Ubuntu (or any other Linux) can perform better with very minor tweaks. e.g. Preload, disabling unnecessary services, reducing swapiness etc. But Fedora is really faster than ubuntu (at least the live image) as per my own experience.


willing to put your money on Fedora9 ? Lets see how good is Fedora 9 with ext4, compared to Ubuntu Hardy with ext3, with both out of box and tweaked conditions. It will be an intresting experiment.


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## subratabera (May 12, 2008)

Fedora is always ahead in implementing new technologies than any other distro. This time also Fedora is the first major distro to package ext4 file system. But it is a little behind of Ubuntu because its a little harder to configure. Also package management is another area where Ubuntu is leading. Let's see what *PackageKit* can do to impress us.


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## MetalheadGautham (May 12, 2008)

btw, fed9 was leaked 2 days ago from what linuxtracker tells.
*linuxtracker.org/index.php?page=torrent-details&id=2dc9caedfe087535556227a156e493815749f2c8


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## mehulved (May 12, 2008)

subratabera said:


> Fedora is always ahead in implementing new technologies than any other distro. This time also Fedora is the first major distro to package ext4 file system.


 You mean sabayon is a minor distro? As per distrowatch it is in top 10 for last 6 months. Or you mean, anything outside top 5 is minor?



MetalheadGautham said:


> willing to put your money on Fedora9 ? Lets see how good is Fedora 9 with ext4, compared to Ubuntu Hardy with ext3, with both out of box and tweaked conditions. It will be an intresting experiment.


Is ext4 the default fs? I doubt, I believe that it's just that ext4 fs support has been added to anaconda's partitioning tool, disk druid, if I remember right.
So, you should have option to select ext4 but it may not be the default file system.

Check *fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Ext4 and *fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraExt4


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## subratabera (May 12, 2008)

mehulved said:


> You mean sabayon is a minor distro? As per distrowatch it is in top 10 for last 6 months. Or you mean, anything outside top 5 is minor?



Thanks for reminding about sabayon. Yes, I admit that's another distro which always gives us bleeding edge technologies.


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## praka123 (May 12, 2008)

MetalheadGautham said:


> Haven't you finished with arch yet ? I suggest you move to gentoo and start rivaling mehulved.
> Or go for FreeBSD + Debian, an excellent Linux + BSD combo for our forum's OSS mascot
> slackware ain't too bad an ultra light weight distro either



Archlinux may stay  .gentoo-It is residing in 2nd hdd.had tried overlays etc.but I think it is a waste of time  .but appreciate their community esp documentation et al. even Arch got ABS which can do the optimization part.

@subrata:yes,even I felt fedora 9 is spontaneous than ubuntu.only gripe(acc. to me) is "rpm" 

packagekit:different distro's implementation of this frontend is not so satisfactory.for eg: I tried foresight linux which uses conary package manager and with packagekit as front-end,it performs worst


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## Garbage (May 12, 2008)

[offtopic]
Don't you guyz going offtopic ??
[/offtopic]

Any way, features of ext4 looks kool... lets see....



> Ext3 tops out at 32 tebibyte (TiB) file systems and 2 TiB files, but practical limits may be lower than this depending on your architecture and system settings—perhaps as low as 2 TiB file systems and 16 gibibyte (GiB) files. *Ext4, by contrast, permits file systems of up to 1024 pebibyte (PiB), or 1 exbibyte (EiB), and files of up to 16 TiB. * This may not be important (yet!) for the average desktop computer or server, but it is important to users with large disk arrays.


OMG !! :O I don't think, I'll need this much data ever in my life ...  



> Most file systems, including ext3, include timestamp data that is accurate to a second. *Ext4 extends the accuracy of this data to a nanosecond.* Some sources also indicate that the ext4 timestamps support dates through *April 25, 2514*, versus January 18, 2038, for ext3.


nice...


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## JGuru (May 12, 2008)

*Ext4 doesn't make any difference to Home users!!! But in an Enterprise setup that
 handles tons of data in TBs, it's sure to put filesystems on steriods. That's were you
 can notice huge Performance gains.*


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