Installing / to a compressed filesystem

liutom · n00b Joined: 30 Sep 2004 Posts: 51

Hello again!

during my slowly growing linux-experience i now consider to try following:
I want to install (gentoo)linux to a compressed filesystem (sometimes found on bootable linux-cd´s)
But i don´t know if there is a easy way to get this?

Perhaps something like: partition my HDD with a special parameter or do a mkreiserfs with special parameters ????

I haven´t found anything which helps me any further...

Thank you

Liu

liutom · n00b Joined: 30 Sep 2004 Posts: 51

In very old DOS-Times -and windows 95 Times there has been a small utility called Drivespace....

Perhaps in linux there is another (much better) method to get this working?

Any ideas?

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

Check out Google. squashfs was within the first few results. Perhaps its a start. sys-fs/squashfs-tools
_________________
Quis separabit? Quo animo?

liutom · n00b Joined: 30 Sep 2004 Posts: 51

Sorry but squashfs is read only!

I thought about a parameter when partition my hdd an use mkreiserfs -XXX
or mkfs.ext3 -YYY an then it creats a filesystem which stores all data compressed...
but i think there is no way!

i´ve heard somthing about a "loop"device.
But i´ve no clue how to us it fpr my need´s...

thankx
liu

ShadowFlyP · n00b Joined: 12 Oct 2004 Posts: 7 Location: Rochester, MN

Try JFFS2. It is meant for filesystems residing on flash, but I would bet it can be used on a hard drive partition. It has built-in compression and journalling. Probably won't be as fast as ext3 or (for sure not) reiser, but would give you your compression.