[NTLUG:Discuss] Need Distro Recommendation, Please

[Ralph Green, Jr.]

Howdy,
  All three of those meet my standards for feature
completeness of a journaling filesystem.  I use all
three, but not just anywhere.  Reiser3 is a pretty
good design, but it gets a lot of patches and it
seems a little hit or miss as to whether you can get
a reliable install of it.  I want a filesystem with
the right features and performance, but it absolutely
has to be reliable.  SuSE uses Reiser3 as their
default filesystem and they are careful about the
patches they put out for it.  I trust Reiser3 on
SuSE, and regularly  use it there.  I have tried it
on a few other distros, but I don't really trust it
anywhere else.  Reiser 4 is even more interesting in
terms of design, but it is not nearly stable enough
for anything but testing.  I am looking forward to
using it in future years along with some innovative
plugins
  XFS and JFS are pretty good on just about any distro
I have tried.  I use them both.  I like the design of
JFS a lttle more, but some distros favor XFS.  For
example, when reading forums on Debian, I regularly
see references to developers using XFS, but rarely
JFS.  So, on Debian(and its off-shoots like Ubuntu),
I usually use XFS.
  There is an odd thing about filesystem support other
than ext3 on CentOS4/TaoLinux4/RHEL4/Fedora that I
have not figured out.  I understand that only works
with ext3.  But, I have tried installing CentOS4 and
Fedora Core 2 and 3 on XFS and JFS.  I pass the kernel
parameters needed to the installer.  I get the option
to create my root filesystem as I want.  I choose to
not install SELinux.  The installer always fails when
the first files are being copied to the root
filesystem.  What does this mean?  I can see two
possibilities.  One is the the installer uses a
SELinux kernel and so it cannot write to a JFS or
XFS filesystem.  That seems pretty stupid on the part
of whoever incorporated SELinux into the installer.
The second option is just that the installer is broken
with respect to installing on other filesystems.  Maybe
the core developers are so satisfied with ext3 that it
never occurred to them to actually test installing on
another filesystem. Since the core developers are
really RedHat people and RedHat developed ext3, maybe
there is just no internal interest in using more
advanced filesystems.  My hunch is that option 2 is
right, but I have not pursued it.  I remember that we
have a member of NTLUG who was working on the Fedora
X64 port.  Perhaps, he will see this message and
comment.
 I think this message has gotten long enough, so I
won't add much more.  When you are choosing a
filesystem, there are a number of factors to consider.
Each filesystem has some advantages.  I don't know if
you have a Computer Science background or not, but if
you do, I'd suggest you do a little research online
and you should be able to find some pretty good
papers describing the design of the various
filesystems.  
Good luck,
Ralph

On Sat, 2005-04-30 at 12:32 -0500, Rick Matthews wrote:
> Your last post was information-packed and much appreciated! I feel 
> like I am proving that no good deed goes unpunished by asking for more:
> What is your preference over ext3, (reiserfs? xfs? jfs?) and what OS
> is needed to avoid "poor filesystem support"?
>