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Re: small school: replacements for MS Word and Excel



On Mon, Jun 04, 2001 at 11:42:18PM -0400, Sean Morgan wrote:

:The situation I'm reffering to here is that of someone who might see a temporary
:interface slowdown or crash(happen quite often in office suites of any kind), 
:and having no knowledge of how linux works, just hits the reset button(this
:could easily get repeated a whole bunch of times throughout the day in a school
:environment, and would do all kinds of nasty things to the fs).

True, I hadn't considered that.

CTRL-ALT-DEL the three fingered salute, does a clean shutdown.  I'd
stress that and put it in big letters on the machine.  Then disconect
the front reset and power buttons.

This won't keep people from pulling the plug, but it makes it easier
to do the right thing than it is to do the wrong thing.

:you seem to be coming from is some kind of server farm or similar setup where 
:the users are all at least competent enough not to do lots of hard resets.  

You'd be surprised what research scientists in Artificial Inteligence
can do to thier machines then shrug and look all innocent :)

:Generally speaking, Linux with ext2 is probably the worst OS I've ever worked 
:with for recovering from mundane stuff like that, 

I have two preschoolers that love the GIMP and linux, bad things have
happened to my machine, but worse things have happened to the Loose95
machine they have for games.  That's just my experience.


:I don't see how RAID mirroring is an option though, as it would only
:serve to guard against mechanical failure, which 
:is sort of beyond the ability of a filesystem to affect one way or the other.

If the power goes during heavy disk usage you risk a head crash, which
is physical damage.  Though journaled fs (reiser or  ext3 and what
ever happened to xfs?) would get more bang for your buck.

I can't speak much to the current state of these in linux.  I've had
reiserfs on my home machine for about 6mo with no issues, though I
haven't tried to see howmuch abuse it will take either.

-Jon



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