[geeks] Dell T105 server arrives

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Apr 2, 2008, at 11:29 , Joshua Boyd wrote:

> As I understand it, Vista is done in such a way that it is more of an
> image copy.  Something along the lines of this process:
> 1) dd if=/dev/dvd/baseSystem.img of=/dev/sda1 bs=16k count=196608
> 2) Expand the file system on /dev/sda1 to fill the partition
> 3) delete unneeded files.

Vista's "base install" is huge though, so it makes sense.

Most sensible UNIX have tiny base installs.

I'm not sure how this would work out for larger UNIX systems like  
Ubuntu Linux.  The full image would be gigantic, so I'm pretty sure  
that the image and delete approach would be pretty bad in that case.

> Sure, but even netbsd would probably install faster if they dd'd a 150
> meg base system to the desired partition, then expanded the FFS to  
> fill
> the partition.  That is, that would be fast if FFS could do that,  
> which
> I don't think it can.

A lot of people do create custom UNIX images and install them.

Most Linux filesystems can be expanded, so a lot of them do it.

That's an interesting question: could I create 1GB or so NetBSD server  
images, and expand FFS after the fact.

That would really be nice.

-- 
"Where some they sell their dreams for small desires."