Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 28th Oct 2008 23:40 UTC
I've been running Windows Vista Ultimate on my Acer Aspire One netbook (with 1.5GB of RAM, and a 30GB hard drive) for a while now, without any problems or performance issues. I have the full Aero Glass experience, and I didn't need to do any performance tweaking or fiddling with services. I even made a few very crappy videos to show it all off. Apparently, Steven Sinofsky thinks Vista - and therefore, Windows 7 - can run just fine on a netbook too, and that's why he demonstrated Windows 7 running on a netbook this morning during the Windows 7 keynote. In an interview with Ars he gave a little more details.
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RE: How much disk space for printer dirvers?
by merkoth on Wed 29th Oct 2008 03:47
in reply to "How much disk space for printer dirvers?"
Member since:2006-09-22
RE[2]: How much disk space for printer dirvers?
by lemur2 on Wed 29th Oct 2008 04:09
in reply to "RE: How much disk space for printer dirvers?"
Member since:2007-02-17
I know this is kinda off-topic (bury as necessary, if you want) but, how does this cache work? I assume those file operations are stored in memory to mantain performance so what happens if you cut the power before flushing the cache to the SSD?
If you just cut the power on any OS, data in transit to open files will be lost. ubifs is no different.
You would lose the data being written in "small writes" to an SSD under the current method in any event.
On a normal shutdown, the cache would of course be flushed to SSD no matter how little data was in it.
RE: How much disk space for printer dirvers?
by Thom_Holwerda on Wed 29th Oct 2008 07:06
in reply to "How much disk space for printer dirvers?"
Member since:2005-06-29
Use a filesystem for the SSD that caches small writes.
...and Windows can do the exact same thing. And you don't even need a special filesystem for it, so no re-installation required. It's called EWBF or EWF.
http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=833&sid=1e66...
http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=179&sid=1e66...
Now you again.
RE[2]: How much disk space for printer dirvers?
by lemur2 on Wed 29th Oct 2008 10:27
in reply to "RE: How much disk space for printer dirvers?"
Member since:2007-02-17
"Use a filesystem for the SSD that caches small writes.
...and Windows can do the exact same thing. And you don't even need a special filesystem for it, so no re-installation required. It's called EWBF or EWF.
http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=833&...
http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=179&...
Now you again. "
Good. Solutions abound, for more than one OS. Excellent.
So now perhaps you can drop the pretense about why you had to install Windows on your Acer Aspire One, and just admit that you are slave to the lock-in.
RE: How much disk space for printer dirvers?
by Googol on Wed 29th Oct 2008 20:19
in reply to "How much disk space for printer dirvers?"
Member since:2006-11-24
without knowing about these drivers in particular, the drivers are of course not 1.5 GB. You have the same on Mac for example and the reason is not the driver in the true sense but rather localization, help, etc -- and if you were honest, Linux drivers are never that fully featured as MS. For example, if I am thinking of my old Creative Sound under XP, true, that was a big download but you got all kind of fancy stuff like tools, etc, whereas for Linux, you only got barely the sound output. I can do drivers small at 3.6 MB. But honestly, for the past 10 years, there have only been times where I had wished my Linux drivers were more like on Windows - and never the other way round.
So it is not that black and white as you make it out to be. Having said that, I don't know what is in these W7 drivers - but so don't you. An MS driver offering the same as a Linux driver is not much different from a Linux driver.
RE[2]: How much disk space for printer dirvers?
by lemur2 on Thu 30th Oct 2008 01:25
in reply to "RE: How much disk space for printer dirvers?"
Member since:2007-02-17
So it is not that black and white as you make it out to be. Having said that, I don't know what is in these W7 drivers - but so don't you. An MS driver offering the same as a Linux driver is not much different from a Linux driver.
I don't think so.
A particular driver in Linux will accomodate a great many devices. Most often, but by no means always, the range of devices covered by a single driver covers a single "chip" rather than any one given manufacturer. Video card drivers address the GPU, not the manufacturer of the card. This becomes even more apparent though when you look at network interfaces including wireless and modems. Sometimes a single driver will cover two or more similar "chips" from different manufacturers ... mouse drivers are a good example here.
In the case of printer drivers for Linux ... applications "write" either postscript or PDF. From an applications point of view those are the two different "types" of printer you can have.
The process from application to printer is convoluted, but essentially CUPS is a set of filters that convert the print data into the final language/format of the printer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS#Filtering_process
Foomatic is one such filter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foomatic
I'm pretty sure that Gutenprint is another:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenprint
Each of the filters covers a very large range of printers.
Most often, the only thing that is required to accomodate a new printer model (and sometimes even a new printer type) is a simple PPD file.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript_Printer_Description
PPD files apply even to non-postscript printers (such as cheap inkjets) becasue CUPS itself is the Postscript interpreter.
When I connect a new network printer on Linux, all I generally need to do is select the PPD file from a long, long list contained within CUPS. If the version of CUPS installed is older, I can often get a newer printer working by downloading a PPD file for it from the net.
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/OpenPrinting/Database/DatabaseInt...
You can even describe a new printer and the database can often make a new PPD file for you where none existed before.
http://www.openprinting.org/edit_printer.cgi?newentry=1
When I install a new network printer on Windows ... Windows attempts to download executable dlls from the printer server to the new client! (This BTW means that a Windows print server can ONLY serve Windows clients).
The fact that each printer type seems to use a specific set of dll files as its printer driver, IMO, easily accounts for the 1.5 GB of printer drivers needed by Windows, versus the 60-odd megabytes needed by Linux.
Edited 2008-10-30 01:40 UTC
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Member since:
2007-02-17
FTA: "We do a lot of really customer focused things, like we have a gigabyte and a half of printer drivers."
Wow. 1.5 GB, just for printer drivers.
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/pst/cups.html
"Download size: 3.6 MB
Estimated disk space required: 62 MB "
Do we have an outrageous discrepancy here, or what?
Use a filesystem for the SSD that caches small writes.
http://lwn.net/Articles/275706/
http://notechie.com/linux-2627-management-ubifs-for-netbook/
http://twinturbo.org/linux/linux-kernel-2627-officially-released/
* write-back support - this dramatically improves the throughput of the file system comparing to JFFS2, which is write-through;
* fast mount time - unlike JFFS2, UBIFS does not have to scan whole media when mounting, it takes milliseconds for UBIFS to mount the media, and this does not depend on flash size; however, UBI initialization time depends on flash size and has to be taken into account (see here for more details);
* tolerance to unclean reboots - UBIFS is a journaling file system and it tolerates sudden crashes and unclean reboots; UBIFS just replays the journal and recovers from the unclean reboot; mount time is a little bit slower in this case, because of the need to replay the journal, but UBIFS does not need to scan whole media, so it anyway takes fractions of a second;
* fast I/O - even with write-back disabled (e.g., if UBIFS is mounted with -o sync mount flag) UBIFS shows good performance which is close to JFFS2 performance; bear in mind, it is extremely difficult to compete with JFFS2 in synchronous I/O, because JFFS2 does not maintain indexing data structures on flash, so it does not have the maintenance overhead, while UBIFS does have it; this is because of the way UBIFS commits the journal - it does not move the data physically from one place to another but instead, it just adds corresponding information to the file system index and picks different eraseblocks for the new journal (i.e., UBIFS has sort of âwanderingâ journal);
* on-the-flight compression - the data is stored in compressed form on the flash media, which makes it possible to put considerably more data to the flash than if the data was not compressed; this is very similar to what JFFS2 has; UBIFS also allows to switch the compression on/off on per-inode basis, which is very flexible; for example, one may switch the compression off by default and enable it only for certain files which are supposed to compress well; or one may switch compression on by default but disable it for supposedly uncompressible data like multimedia files; at the moment UBIFS supports only Zlib and LZO compressors and it is not difficult to add more"
Write-back support is apparently what you want.
This means that if you have a netbook with SSD flash only, you don't have to make it vulnerable by installing XP Home, you don't have to buy a hard disk drive to install Vista on it, and you don't have to wait for Windows 7 ...
... just get a Linux distribution that includes the 2.6.27 kernel, and use the ubifs filesystem for the root partition on the SSD.
The only problem will be getting grub or some other bootloader to load it ... sigh!
Edited 2008-10-29 03:26 UTC