PAUD 2.0.3 review

PAUD (Parted And Utilities Disk) is a Linux utility boot disk distribution

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Nehal

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PAUD (Parted And Utilities Disk) is a Linux utility boot disk distribution. It fits on a single 1.44 floppy disk. It contains mc, parted, and other utilities such as filesystem utilities for ext2, ext3, and Reiserfs. It is great for partition maintenance and for rescue purposes.

The latest version of PAUD (1.0.4) has glibc-2.2.5, kernel 2.4.20, support for up to 4 virtual consoles. Kernel has DMA support (click here for more info on DMA) , SCSI support is not available out-of-the-box but it can be easily implemented.

The kernel has filesystem support for FAT/VFAT, EXT2, EXT3, ReiserFS 3.5, and ReiserFS 3.6 filesystems. Parted supports creating, resizing, copying, and destroying of these filesystem types (please read notes for reiserfs and ext3).

This is a list of all the commands, some of these commands are internal commands of busybox:

busybox commands:

[, ash, basename, busybox, cat, chgrp, chmod, chown, chroot, chvt, clear, cp, cut, date, dd, df, dirname, dmesg, du, echo, env, false, find, free, grep, gunzip, gzip, halt, head, id, init, kill, killall, klogd, linuxrc, ln, logger, ls, lsmod, mkdir, mknod, mkswap, modprobe, more, mount, mv, pidof, poweroff, ps, pwd, reboot, reset, rm, rmdir, sed, sh, sleep, sort, swapoff, swapon, sync, syslogd, tail, tar, test, touch, true, tty, umount, uname, uniq, uptime, wc, which, whoami, xargs, yes, zcat

Other commands:

e2fsck, hdparm, mc, mkreiserfs-3.5, parted, reiserfsck, tune2fs

Notes:

SCSI: SCSI support is not enabled in the kernel, if you wish to use scsi devices with PAUD, you can make a custom kernel and put it on the disk with the rootdisk. The docs section on the PAUD project page will show you how.

ntfs: Many people have asked about NTFS support, specifically the 'ntfsresize' program. I can't fit this on the floppy, but an optional expansion floppy solution will be available shortly.

ReiserFS: mkreiserfs-3.5 can only make reiserfs filesystems version 3.5, if you want to make reiserfs version 3.6, use parted. All other reiserfs functions in parted, including resize, work for both versions. Run 'reiserfsck --fix-fixable' after modifying any paritions from parted, to fix any potential problems.

Ext3: parted cannot create ext3 filesystems, although there is a simple way to do it in PAUD. First create an ext2 partition from parted, then create a journal to convert it to ext3 with 'tune2fs -j'.

hdparm/DMA: DMA isn't enabled by default, 'hdparm' fixes this problem by allowing you to enable DMA using the '-d1' option. Using the 'hdparm' disk speed test, i saw an increase in speed from 4.6 mb/sec (default) to 25.2 mb/sec (dma enabled).

mc: 'mc' is a great way of transferring files between filesystems (for Windows/DOS users) or for editing files if you need to. It can also be useful if you ever need to use PAUD for rescue purposes.

mounting: If you get an error when mounting that a filesystem cannot be found on the device, a different filesystem may have been found. Type 'mount' to see if it was actually mounted or not.

What's New in This Release:
The kernel was updated to 2.4.20 to support hard drives that are greater than 137GB.