Center for Telecommunications Studies of PUC-Rio
PUC-Rio (Brasil)
WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING
This is completely UNSUPPORTED.
Neither RedHat nor us will provide any kind of
support on this software.
Use at your own risk.
WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING
RedHat 8.0 is out and reported to support ReiserFS the same way as 7.3. We've made a local mirror of iso images containing binaries for instalation here.
Well folks, that's it. We have erased our 7.1 image. There's no point in keeping it anymore. We have seen by the two messages below that it's possible to install RH7.2 with ReiserFS. Furthermore, RH7.3 is fresh out of the oven...
We have a new insteresting method of creating ReiserFS fresh intallations. This one should work, we have done this here before with floppy disks and ks.cfg files. But, as usual, we have not tested this particular procedure! Thanks Cory for your help!
We have received an e-mail from Mike Cencula ( mike@cencula.com ) showing how to install a fresh reiserfs partition / filesystem using RedHat 7.2. Thanks Mike, for your support. Warning: We have not tested this particular procedure!
We have received a lot of e-mail about building a new patch for 7.2 instalation. First, the facts:
With these facts in mind, we will state our official position: we _DO_NOT_ intend to create a new patch for 7.2. The reason is simple: ReiserFS is a nice journaling file system, we are thankfull to Hans Reiser and his team of developers for it. But it's main advantage was that it was the _first_ journaling file system to reach a relatively stable condition, so that it was usable. But today we have an option: ReiserFS vs Ext3, so we can choose.
The main disadvantage of ReiserFS is that it has metadata only journaling. For those wondering ``what the f... is that?'', it means that only system data is journaled, user data is not. The great advantage of this approach is that it's fast and we don't have to run that lenghty fsck, but eventually, there will be file corruption. Notice that file corruption is not the same as File System corruption. But what we want to say is that user data is eventually lost, and that is a Bad Thing(TM).
Today we have another option, which is Ext3. Ext3 is backward and forward compatible with Ext2. This means that to convert an existing Ext2 partition to Ext3, you just have to add the journal, which is easy and quick. Also, this means that an Ext3 partition can be used as an Ext2 partition by an older kernel without Ext3 support.
Ext3 has 3 operating modes, which we list here, in order from the fastest to the slowest:
So, to conclude this long discourse, our recommendations to upgrade to RedHat 7.2 are:
We will not go on to discuss speed here. ReiserFS is probably much faster, there are lots of benchmarks on the internet examining several aspects of this subject. Our main concern is data integrity, even if it turns out to be a few miliseconds slower.
Competition is good folks, soon there will be ReiserFS 4, and maybe it will kick Ext3 ass. But watch for Tux2FS ...
Ok folks, our ftp server is back again, but 4-mr is not out ( yet ). Let's hope we can manage it before RedHat 7.2. And let's hope 7.2 does not need these hacks any more.
We are having problems with the new images generation. This is the same problem reported by Lachlan Audas, but now in 3-mr. Every time we generate an image, a random directory vanishes from stage2.img. We hope to fix this soon. I'm really sorry, folks, this one I didn't expect. Until then, we shall upload the old images (1-mr), so be aware of the bugs reported here in this page. At least, this one works on lots of systems.
Don't forget to download the update disk for 1-mr images.
We have new images (7.1-3mr). This time it was a bug in stage2.img. Thanks to Lachlan Audas.
We have new images (7.1-2mr). We found a bug in netstg1.img images. The images have hardcoded size values in mk-images.i386, and because the stage1 size got bigger, things were not working. This is only an issue for people needing network instalation.
The new images also have the mkinitrd issue fixed, so that you don't need of the update disk for this image ( at least for now :-) ).
We found a bug in our instalation (thanks to Pavel Shamis). People with scsi disks or needing mkinitrd were having a hard time. If you need mkinitrd running on your installed system, please download _THIS_ update disk , which is meaningfull only with the 7.1-1mr images, which are no longer available in this site.
At last! We have a new CD image (7.1-1mr). It's RedHat 7.1 based and features:
The links are in the section ``Images'', near the end of this page. Those of you that do not need these new features, may still download the update disk from the link below and use it with the ORIGINAL RedHat 7.1 images, sparing you from the long download of our NEW and PATCHED images (7.1-1mr).
We learned a few tricks since our first reiserfs hack in RedHat 7.0: Now we have been able to add reiserfs support in RedHat 7.1 installation using a single update disk . No need to rebuild the images, just write the floppy and use it with the original cds. Read below for more information and download.
I know, I know....RedHat 7.1 is out...It doesn't feature reiserfs on installation. I will try to download from some mirror to check if the anaconda can be changed with a single update disk. The 2.4.2 kernel they are using _should_ include reiserfs and the mkreiserfs _might_ be present too. I need to download the files to find out.
New images online (7.0-7mf) fixing the bug in installer. Now it's also possible to upgrade systems already using reiserfs. That's it, have fun...
Sorry everybody, I've found a bug in my last images... It's a very small bug, but it's all my fault and it doesn't let you install a reiserfs system from the CDs. Installation from HD (this is how I tested it) works well. If you know brazilian slang: "dei mole..."
Please download the update disk and copy it to a floppy disk with the command 'dd if=updatedisk010312.img of=/dev/fd0'. At the first screen from instalation type 'linux updates' or 'text updates' to fix the problem. This update disk is not needed when using version 7.0-7mf (the only one available for download) so I removed it from the ftp server.
7.0-6mf released with the features described below. This should be the last release of these images before RedHat ships their new distro, kernel 2.4 based. May also be my last update ever, I don't know. The last important missing feature is the ability to upgrade a system already using reiserfs. If you want to help, take a look at upgradeFindRoot function from todo.py. Play with the try-catch (oops, try-except in python!) to mount as reiserfs... (this may be changed using a update disk) BTW: the PAP-5190 (ioctl bug) was fixed.
I'm finishing 7.0-6mf including latest 2.2.17 kernel from redhat (fixes security bugs) and reiserfs 3.5.31. Our newest patch for anaconda will be able to select which partition to use ext2 or reiserfs. KDE-2.1 should be included too. Stay tuned.
7.0-5mf is released. There is a bug in reiserfs code that was reported by Jean-Michel POURE. The bug affects even the latest reiser version 3.5.29 for kernel 2.2.x, locking up the system when one tries to access (usually) the file /boot/messages. It looks like there's no risk of data corruption, as the affected file can be accessed using kernel 2.4.1 without error. For more information look at www.reiserfs.org and search the mailing list for "PAP-5190". Therefore it's recommended to users upgrade to 2.4.1 if they experience this problem. IT IS SAFE TO INSTALL A SYSTEM WITH THE PROVIDED CDS. I will try to generate new 2.2.x kernel as soon as this bug is corrected and hopefully using 2.2.19 as it will fix somes issues in VM subsystem.
Just a small note about QT: 7.0-5mf installs qt-2.2.2 as default, qt-2.2.3 may be found at the second cd. I had problems using kde-2.0.1 with qt-2.2.3 and I will not try any daily build kde version to see if it's fixed. As I want a stable RedHat distro I haven't upgraded neither qt nor kde.
7.0-5mf will be delayed a little. I'm waiting a response from ReiserFS team if I should upgrade to latest 3.5.29 or the version below is stable. A drawback of using 3.5.29 would be that there are no 2.2.18 from RedHat, and we may lose some patches that we are using in 2.2.17.
Besides, I need more testing with X4.0.2 and qt-2.2.3. Using them seems to enable antialiased fonts in KDE2, but also losing a lot of font types that worked before...
We lost the root filesystem of this machine, the site was out for almost all day. Taking advantage of this tragic event, we finally made the upgrade from the old and good RH 6.2 to the newest RH 7.0-5mf. The old root fs was ext2 and I never saw one dying so badly and for no apparent reason. Now the system is fully ReiserFS powered! :)
If you want to start downloading the images it's better to wait for the new files (7.0-5mf) that will be available in a couple of days. There's still some minor dependencies I need to fix before putting it on the ftp. I think it's a really great distro, besides all RH7 erratas up to date I have updated some (hopefully) stable packages from rawhide (the test distro from redhat) like XFree86-4.0.2-1, initscripts-5.54, Xconfigurator-4.5, qt-2.2.3 and gcc-2.96-70. This gcc was released yesterday and fixes 11 bugs after the RedHat 7.0 errata!
Don't email us asking to include some package on that cds, We made this for our personal use only and we're just opening it to the web because people really liked it.
If you want to rebuild you own RH7 discs, please try this
RedHat7 CDs Mini-HowTo
There is also a simplified chinese version
Download from 01:00 to 10:00 GMT (or weekends) for best transfer speeds. I don't mind if you try at another time, but be warned that the university link will probably be saturated. The ftp is limited to 50 users. We only have 10Mbits/s of bandwidth and we don't want your download to take more than 10 hours!! :)
Yes, you HAVE to download the 2 images. By including all the updates described above i needed to change both RH7 cds.
RedHat7.1-1mr(disc1)
RedHat7.1-1mr(disc2)
MD5SUM
ks.cfg - Kickstart configuration example
Mirror at udoj.org (thanks to Udo Jocher)
Here you can get all the fundamental source RPMS that we changed or added. If you want any other source not listed below you can get them from RedHat or kde servers.
anaconda-7.1-7mr.src.rpm
reiserfsprogs-3.x.0j-1.src.rpm
lilo-21.6-5mdk.src.rpm
RedHat 7.1 Update disk - update-rh71reiser-v1.img
anaconda-7.0.1-9mf.src.rpm
reiser-utils-3.5.31-1.src.rpm
kernel-2.2.17-14.R.src.rpm
mkbootdisk-1.2.8-2mf.src.rpm
You might be interested in other projects like running multiple users on the same computer (multiple keyboard/mouse/displays).
Small embedded system with massive storage: PCMCIA socket for the nanoEngine board
If you need a good video player (including DVD) try this Daily xine builds with CSS support.
Center for Telecommunications Studies of PUC-Rio
PUC-Rio (Brasil)
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