[KLUG Members] Speed comparison of all major Linux filesystems.

[Adam Williams]

> > Since we're talking, what do you think would be a fair price
> > for such a service?  I can see it being a premium charged on
> > top of the supporting membership fee of $25/year.  How much
> > extra would you pay for access to the ISO images all the time?
> No offense to the BSware sales and marketing departments :) but I
> think as broadband becomes more commonly available the need for
> this will fade away.

My experice has been, that as of late, the availability of working and
affordable broadband is actually declining.

> BSware is still a great idea for people who are new to Linux and
> who have only dialup net access at home.  It jump-starts them into
> an install that has no known security problems, which probably
> gives them a few weeks of grace time before they have to become
> sysadmins for real and start downloading current packages to keep
> their systems secure.
> But more and more Linux distros are starting to do updates to the
> proper, current versions of their packages automatically, over the
> net, at install time.  Many have one command that from a shell
> prompt means "fetch all current versions and install."  Debian has
> done this for ages:  it really doesn't matter if your Debian install
> CD is a year old, that just means it'll take a few minutes more
> during the install process because it has a few more updated
> packages to download.

There are still lots of systems with no Internet connectivity
what-so-ever.  These are primarily what I use BS-Ware for, that and
installing into VMware (on a laptop on a train perhaps) with no Internet
available.  Beyond that it saves the install-update-kernel-reboot phase,
which is nice.  I think there is still plenty of niche's for BS-Ware,
although certainly broadband has elimited many.

> Gentoo just did this for me too (BTW, on a K5-500 CPU with 300 MB of
> RAM, it still took 24 hours to compile everything on the install!).

Now that sounds like fun!

> I haven't been paying too terribly much attention to the Red Hat
> side of things, but I have heard good things about up2date, the
> free/Free remix "up2us", and of course Ximian's Red Carpet tool.

I'm a paying red-carpet customer, that works extremely well.