Submitted by “Let’s take a look at SquashFS. SquashFS is a read-only compressed file system that has a variable block size. The primary intent of the file system is for constrained block device/memory systems. The classic example targets SquashFS for embedded systems but there are other uses for it that fall outside of the embedded world, and could surprise you.”
For awhile there I was using SquashFS to save space on my EeePC 901 (compressing /usr), and it really seemed to contribute to the over all speed of my boot and I really regretted having to give it up due to some issues with suspending was interfering with the clean unmounting of the system, plus updates were constantly adding up and I wanted to go back to using as vanilla a system as I could. A bit later I found an old post in the Ubuntu Forums that listed various packages that most users would not need and removing most of those returned me to the large amounts of free space compressing /usr had given me, so I came out ahead in the end.
SquashFS is great when it works!
–bornagainpenguin
Spot on. Coincidently, I spent all day yesterday trying to build a new LiveDVD from my sources only to again see the dreaded:
mount: Mounting /dev/loop0 on /newroot/mnt/livecd failed: Invalid argument.
Remember this? Everytime squashfs changes version it back to the drawing board, recompile kernel, update here, update there, cross fingers.
In the end I couldn’t get it all working again…I found it easier to remaster the sysrescuecd. They can bash their head against the wall from now on.
Again, good when it works!
The articles’ author apparently feels that the linked video is well worth watching. At least he says so. I watched the first 60 seconds… and it turns out to be one of those great videos which are so blurry you cannot make out anything at all that the slides say, or in fact make out the speaker’s face except as a sort of light colored blur hovering above what looks vaguely like it might be a podium. With sound quality so poor, so echoey, so filled with background noise, that in sixty seconds of speech, the only word I was able to make out was (I think) “company”.
Sadly, this is hardly an isolated case. Why do people bother to put such totally useless multimedia on the web?