[Bug 204187] Re: No compressed file system option in the installer

[Jörn Schönyan]

I did some testing on this issue with Lubuntu 14.04. As I don't have a
eeePC (or simmilar) with 4 Gigs hard disk, I used Virtualbox. On a real
machine, it's possible to cheat Ubiquity about the avaible space with a
pendrive, as that isn't working in Virtualbox, I made a virtual disk
with 4,75 GB space. I gave the VM one of my four cores (mobile Intel i5,
third generation) and only 512 MB RAM, to simulate the first eeePCs as
good as possible. My steps:

* normal boot to the desktop with 14.04 live iso
* install btrfs-tools
* created 3 partitions with GParted: 128 MB /boot (ext2), 128 MB /swap and the rest was for the btrfs root partition
* I applied the workaround in [1] (see above) and did the installation more or less normally
* before the reboot, I edited the /etc/fstab of the new installation to reflect the compression
* finally: only reboot, no virtualbox-guest-dkms, no updates, nothing

The installation only uses ~1 GB disk space (df -h showed 980M). 3,3 GB
shown as free. Subtract the additional 0,75 GB I needed to let Ubiquity
work, the fictional eeePC would have at least 2,5 GB free disk space. I
think this is really awesome! The VM is quite responsive, too. Firefox
opens in 2-3 seconds.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/204187

Title:
  No compressed file system option in the installer

Status in “debian-installer” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged
Status in “ubiquity” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  Having a compressed file system available in Ubiquity would be useful
  to Install onto small devices (say a 1-4GB Usb drive)

  The jffs2 filesystem is in the Ubuntu kernel, but is missing from ubiquity (as of Mar 08 Daily LiveCD). Jffs would presumably be ideal for flash based devices.
  Userspace support seems to be poor. and mtd-tools is in universe rather than main.

  Other options exist, but seem less optimal.
  compFUSEd is userspace. Might be OK. Probably not as good as JFFS2.
  Reiserfs4 is not in the Ubuntu Kernel.
  e2compr is very old and not in the kernel.

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