My own stupidity and ext4
It’s really not in my nature to make stupid mistakes but this time I excelled in stupidness. I was at the verge of finishing a package for arch linux. It was a driver package for a brother mfc 8870dw printer to be more precisely. The pkgbuild was all done and i wanted to remove the directories usr and var it had created. Instead I typed the command to remove the /usr and /var system directories. A mistake everyone now and then makes and that doesn’t make it a stupid one either. What made it a stupid one is that I reluctantly ignored the warning about no sufficient permissions and retryed the same commando with sudo. I realized the mistake soon thereafter – it took way too long to remove them, the usr and var directory weren’t that big after all – but the damage was already done. A big part of /usr/bin was already deleted and as a result I could barely launch a program.
I suppose I could have fixed everything without reinstalling but that would have taken too much time. Instead I decided it was time to try out the new ext4 filesystem and reinstalled arch linux. I finally benefit from having a separate home partition. All my personal files and settings were still there. Ext4, the successor of ext3, has finally reached the stable status and is supported by kernel 2.6.28+. I’m not really experiencing a significant speed boost during every day usage but fsck and journal recovery is way faster. I’ve read that ext4 has a lot of issues coping with “problematic” shutdowns. Problematic being power loss or simply turning of the computer with the power button. I tryed it a few times and I didn’t experience any error. I don’t even get these problematic shutdowns if I don’t stage them so I guess I’m pretty safe after all.