First take a look at your run levels: Run Level 1 (in SuSE) is multi-user with no network. Run Level S is single user. However, if you need better timings, you might want to hack the parallel port driver. On 23 Mar 00, at 15:11, Stuart Hall wrote:

I am in the process of writing a program that will time slot cars around my basement track for Linux. In doing this, it is becoming apparent that I need to have pretty good access to my parallel port - so much so that not many other processes can be running at the same time.

I have a minimum install, plus a little networking, installed on my 486-33 box w/ 16 meg ram. However, when doing a "top" last night, I see that almost 15 meg of ram is already being used by other processes - one of which is sendmail.

I am obviously going to have to get rid of sendmail, smb, nfs and any other services running on this machine. Are there any other suggestions for what I should be looking for to delete? When I did this "top", I was running in console mode with one user (root) only. There was nothing that appeared to be taking more than 4% of memory - in fact most of the items were taking 0.0 memory.

Any suggestions on how I can free up this machine would be appreciated. I need to get it so it is as "fast" and light as a DOS install.

Thanks, Stuart

-- Stuart Hall Cheshire, Connecticut, USA Linux User# 141732

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Jerry Feldman Associate Director Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/

On 23-Mar-00 Stuart Hall wrote:

Any suggestions on how I can free up this machine would be appreciated. I need to get it so it is as "fast" and light as a DOS install.

I think you answered your own question.... DOS ! For such a "real time" application you will probably always have problems with a standard linux kenel/system. I have a DOS box that I keep just for such applications. Peter. ---------------------------------- E-Mail: Peter Onion Date: 23-Mar-00 Time: 15:39:35 This message was sent by XFMail ---------------------------------- -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/

ooh..also, there used to be a patch for the kernel that would re-order IRQ priorities. couple that with the QNX scheduler patch, and you could prolly get a 'near-real-time' race car clocker..:) -- ======================================================================== Rocky McGaugh Atipa Linux Solutions Product Development www.atipa.com rocky@smluc.org rmcgaugh@atipa.com ======================================================================== On Thu, 23 Mar 2000, Stuart Hall wrote:

I am in the process of writing a program that will time slot cars around my basement track for Linux. In doing this, it is becoming apparent that I need to have pretty good access to my parallel port - so much so that not many other processes can be running at the same time.

I have a minimum install, plus a little networking, installed on my 486-33 box w/ 16 meg ram. However, when doing a "top" last night, I see that almost 15 meg of ram is already being used by other processes - one of which is sendmail.

I am obviously going to have to get rid of sendmail, smb, nfs and any other services running on this machine. Are there any other suggestions for what I should be looking for to delete? When I did this "top", I was running in console mode with one user (root) only. There was nothing that appeared to be taking more than 4% of memory - in fact most of the items were taking 0.0 memory.

Any suggestions on how I can free up this machine would be appreciated. I need to get it so it is as "fast" and light as a DOS install.

Thanks, Stuart

-- Stuart Hall Cheshire, Connecticut, USA Linux User# 141732

-- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/

On Thu, 23 Mar 2000, Stuart Hall wrote:

I have a minimum install, plus a little networking, installed on my 486-33 box w/ 16 meg ram. However, when doing a "top" last night, I see that almost 15 meg of ram is already being used by other processes - one of which is sendmail.

If you don't intend to be using this box as a mailserver, then you can get rid of sendmail. Don't just kill it, uninstall it. Same sort of thing with other services you don't want. And, 16 meg *is* fairly tight. Particularly if you try to run X. However, you don't necessarily have a problem. You might, or you might not. There are several ways of seeing your memory usage. The most popular two are: free: shows memory and swapfile occupied for various purposes top: 4th/5th lines sames as free However, for seeing if you have a memory problem, the command you want is vmstat and I'll recommend the appropriate man page for details on all fields. But I will direct you to two fields. Toward the middle of the line, the top title is "swap" and under it are two subtitles: "si" and "so". These are the current activity (not allocation, activity) level on the swapfile, measured in kilobytes per second, one for input and one for output. You really really like low numbers in these two fields, particularly in si. Each time si is incremented, it means that - from your application's point of view - time froze for several hundred clock cycles, while it had work it COULD have been doing for you. If si is high, not only do your processes spend a lot of time waiting, so do you. -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/