A while ago I thought it would be a good idea to make a backup of my Linux server by just dumping the complete disk to a file. In retrospect, it would have been much easier had I just dumped the individual filesystems.
When I finally got around to using this backup, long after the 10GB disk had perished I realized that to use the loopback device to mount a filesystem it actually needs a filesystem to mount. What I had was a disk image, including partition table and individual partitions. To further complicate matters the data partition was also not the first partition inside this image.
When using the ext2 or ext3 filesystem by default 5% of the available blocks is reserved for use by the root user. This allows the system to continue running if non-root users fill up the file system and also assists in preventing file fragmentation because the filesystem does not fill up completely.
On a recent Acer laptop (TravelMate 5620) running Vista I installed Microsoft Office 2007 and Outlook worked the first time, but after opening it a second time it gave me an error message, saying that “This application has failed to start because MSVCR80.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem.” After numerous attempts to restart Office I either received this error message or it tried to re-install itself.
When using Midnight Commander with the default settings of PuTTY connected to my Ubuntu Linux machine the line drawing characters are all messed up.
Andre Miller's technology and projects blog