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Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide (2026) (www.fosslinux.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 2 points 3 months ago* (6 children)

Is ext4rat still a thing? That would be a nice tip for anyone running the system on hdds

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    What's ext4rat? Web searches don't turn anything up and I must have missed out on whatever it is, or was. (Which wouldn't be the first time.)

    I did find a Python script called ext4ract which apparently pulls files out of an ext4 filesystem, but it doesn't seem to be a hugely well-known tool and I'm not sure how it's relevant here.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    It's a tool that allowed to put all the files read during boot time in a sequential order in the hdd, minimizing the read time, so the device booted much faster.

    It's this one: https://e4rat.sourceforge.net/

    Note: I searched using duckduckgo and found it normally

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

    DuckDuckGo is my default engine. It assumed I meant "extract" and gave me a dictionary definition along with links to download WinZip and WinRAR. When I told it I actually meant what I typed, it put it in quotes and returned no results.

    It was not obvious that I should have omitted the X and the T.

    What I apparently didn't do was try Google afterwards, and I'm a little disturbed that I didn't. Adding !g to the search in DDG is usually the first thing I do when it can't find anything, but my browser history suggests I didn't do that.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    Only now after reading your comment that I realized it's e4rat, and not ext4rat lol. I could swear I saw it written as ext4rat somewhere some years ago!

    But anyway, I used ddg too, and it gave me that link among the first results, which is weird. I thought their search was reproducible, but turns out it's not, just like google...

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    But anyway, I used ddg too, and it gave me that link among the first results, which is weird. I thought their search was reproducible, but turns out it's not, just like google...

    sometimes I navigate to a result in the same tab, but just before clicking I notice another result that could also be relevant. then I navigate back, and now the results are somewhat different, usually the result I was looking at being omitted, and with a different order too. after that reloading it always gives the same results.

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