Tails - Why was FAT32 chosen for partion 1 and not ext2 ?

Title says it all. EXT2 would be better because: when some ludite puts the drive in their computer - it ask them if they want to format the drive (because it has ext2 on it and windows doesn't recognize it). Wouldn't that be better than showing them a FAT32 parition with which they can see all the files in the boot parition and deduce what the drive is for?

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comment 2

The ?design document of the USB installer says:

The Tails system partition uses a FAT32 filesystem, mainly because it is the one supported by SYSLINUX we may easily create, in a programmatic manner, from Windows systems. This choice has consequences that are barely related to the USB installation task: the restrictions on filenames imposed by the FAT32 filesystem limits what can be shipped on the system parition (e.g. Tails documentation is only available inside Tails).

That makes sense if at some point we want to support using the installer from Windows.

Comment by Tails — Sat 04 Aug 2012 02:48:16 PM CEST

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