Running 18 days
without a restart.

Label your Linux Partitions with e2label

After reading the earlier post on using MountX to mount Linux partitions on the Mac desktop, Marc Shapiro suggested a little Linux utility called e2label, and it's included with every distro. e2label lets you assign a label to your Linux partitions. This label can come in handy in several ways, one of which is that MountX will use the label instead of the generic MountX 1 hard disk name.

Another benefit is when viewing the Boot Log. Any entry referring to the partitions will mention them by label:

fsck: Root: clean, 7553/125984 files, 150155/502615 blocks
fsck: Home has reached maximal mount count, check forced.
fsck: Home: 18490/75840 files (3.1% non-contiguous), 102106/151502 blocks
fsck: Usr has reached maximal mount count, check forced.
fsck: Usr: 75427/373888 files (0.3% non-contiguous), 348829/747104 blocks

In /etc/fstab, you can refer to a partition by its LABEL instead of /device name.

LABEL=Root / ext2 defaults 1 1
LABEL=Home /home ext2 defaults 1 3
LABEL=Usr /usr ext2 defaults 1 4

But I would be remiss if I didn't mention that with the newest MacOS 9 disk drivers, MountX is not a happy little application. I had so many Finder restarts the computer was unusable. But still, given the other options, e2label is a nice utility for Linux users.