aLinux 12.9 Review

A couple of days ago I have read a post by Clint Canada, in which he described a Linux distribution with a history that spans over a decade, yet I have never heard of it. It is called aLinux, but it was previously known as Peanut. Version 12.9 was released on the 22nd of February, after almost three years and a half of development. Read on for a review of this hobbyist distro created by Jay Klepacs.

Linux SSD Optimization Guide

Solid state drives went from being the new kid on the block to being a stock option in a very short period of time. There has been a lot of speculation concerning SSDs, most of it concentrated on the reliability aspect of them. Although now it is clear that journaling filesystems aren't such a big problem as initially thought to be, you may still want to optimize your computer's operating system and limit the number of writes that the drive receives. Also, some of the optimizations that will be presented in this article only have a performance impact that is related to how the kernel treats the drive and its cache options, rather than trying to divert writes from it.

Checking your disk partitions without rebooting Linux

Sometimes you might find yourself in the situation of having a power failure, and your Linux distro just started up without checking the disk. This is especially a problem if you are using the older non-journaling EXT2 file system.
There are other situations in which you would want to manually check the integrity of your partitions and avoid the hassle of rebooting the system if you find that nothing wrong happened. So, let's see how we can achieve that.