Nice article, I enjoyed it. As a former Computer Engineering major (in a galaxy far far away, ahemm, Kalamazoo MI, many many years ago..) with no clue about SquashFS, my guess is it is necessary/useful only when the actual "overhead" of the FS structures is significant- you have a lot of small files with really long path names: mp3 players anyone? Otherwise why not just use tar gzip or bzip? Lately file managers are really good at using these just as regular directory files- you can browse web pages, play movies/songs, etc. And I am saying this, because why in the world would you want to do compression on sensitive data such as inodes and such, if you do not absolutely have to? In this light, examples 1 and 2 are a bit contrived: you always can mount a partition read-only in the Unix world ! And if the user insists on online data access, the problem is completely different, rather a moral debate: if he is willing to pay for that, he should have that and he should have it with no "strings attached". There is always a tradeoff between redundancy and space, sometimes you want one, sometimes the other. »

Well, I'm no expert, but why not use ext3 or other *nix free filesystem ? Otherwise, looks to me MS won, basically the patch technically limits your capabilities... »

I should be bored to death to find this funny (OK, not a boxing fan, just a stinkin' european pacifist). As someone else pointed out, there are quite a few "factually incorrect" things too. On a lighter note, if KOffice would give me a way more usable/extensible KFormula, who needs MS Office? But sadly, it's not halfway to MS Equation Editor (not that it can do a lot). Give me an EASY way to typeset in tex (kind of what Lyx tried and failed) and I'm a believer, no matter what the eye candy or libraries you use to paint dots on the screen. »

Wonder if you really did your homework.. First, small systems are rather embedded devices, PDAs, phones, so on.. OK, so it's rather about old systems, fine. But KMail comes with KDE libraries dependencies, and most distros pack it together with other "goodies" they shove on your throat! (well, since it's Linux, there always will be alternatives though, like the kdemod on Arch!). Also, I see no mention about Opera- which is not GPL, but still a freebie, and can go toe to toe with Firefox and IE for features. Since we are at it, Openbox is in my opinion as light as IceWM/Blackbox, but comes with easier/friendlier tools to make/edit menus. And KOffice is only relatively lighter than OO, yet still weighs in considerably. Just for word processing you could use Abiword or the older Maxwell (needs compatible libs installed, though) Overall, I will give credit for the good intention and honest effort, but notice some completely out of subject blurbs; I'll quote just one now: "Increasing disk space is usually fairly easy and inexpensive. ..blaj blah blah ... Transferring data from one disk to another is possible, but it is beyond the scope of this column to describe the process." Not exactly the scope of the article either. Hope you don't mind the criticism, it was not my intension to start flame wars ... but I appreciate good things ... »

COmplete waste of time/paper (sic); could understand this as casual conversation at a party, to get some attention ... Also, why is "parallel computing" figuring in here? It's not the business of the admin to write and optimize the programs. How about some resource allocation and control ? THAT would be admin business, if someone hogs the cluster !! Again, what a waste of time and energy ! Sincerely, Larry Tobos »