When I installed SuSe I went with the default install. I have a 14 gig hard drive and 320mb of RAM. My problem is is that I left it default when installing it and it created a 640mb swap partition. In the manual it says that I wouldn?t really need that much of a swap drive considering they were thought of when memory was small. When I went to the Linux Documentation Project and downloaded one of thier documents, it talked about it as if necessary to have a large swap partition. Which one is right? I?d like to cut it in half to save space. I tried to reinstall everything with Win98 starup disk and fdisk didn?t recognize the logical partition anyway and was fruitless. I keep a 3 gig partition for 98 only because there?s a few games I want to finish. Otherwise I?m sold with Linux and can get around pretty well. I have a k62 450. Get it, this is 2 questions. William Fisher -- ____________________________________________ http://www.operamail.com Get OperaMail Premium today - USD 29.99/year Powered by Outblaze
I have 512 MB of Ram, and 512 Mb of swap. Works well, and I use vmware to run Windows 98 se and some other linuxes I like to tweak... The problem with the swap is that you really don't need it at all most of the time (mine is always @ 1-2% of use), but when you need it, you really need it. Swap will also slow your system down, so if you see your system swapping you should consider more ram. The old/safe ;-) school will teach you that you need a swap doubling your RAM, and this is true is you run linux on an very old machine, with small memory. I myself am happy with the same amount. As for partitioning, if you want to repartition your entire hard drive you should first run fdisk /mbr to clean the Master Boot Record which was written by SuSE and Win98 has problem reading it (!!!pay atention fdisk /mbr has to be run after booting from the rescue disk and WILL ERASE YOUR ENTIRE PARTITION TABLE, so you will lose all partitions - make backup). Hope this helps. Regards, Sourian On Sun, 2003-06-15 at 09:34, cxiii - wrote:
When I installed SuSe I went with the default install. I have a 14 gig hard drive and 320mb of RAM. My problem is is that I left it default when installing it and it created a 640mb swap partition. In the manual it says that I wouldn?t really need that much of a swap drive considering they were thought of when memory was small. When I went to the Linux Documentation Project and downloaded one of thier documents, it talked about it as if necessary to have a large swap partition.
Which one is right? I?d like to cut it in half to save space. I tried to reinstall everything with Win98 starup disk and fdisk didn?t recognize the logical partition anyway and was fruitless. I keep a 3 gig partition for 98 only because there?s a few games I want to finish. Otherwise I?m sold with Linux and can get around pretty well. I have a k62 450. Get it, this is 2 questions.
William Fisher -- ____________________________________________ http://www.operamail.com Get OperaMail Premium today - USD 29.99/year
Powered by Outblaze -- Sourian <sourian@go.ro>
On Saturday 14 June 2003 22:46, Sourian wrote:
Swap will also slow your system down, so if you see your system swapping you should consider more ram.
You should be carefull how you say this. First, its not true that swap will slow your system down. Secong, there are many ex-windows users that think ANY use of swap is bad and start worrying about swap useage that is a normal part of linux operation. The truth of the matter is you are way better off if you NEVER pay any attention to swap unless your system is on its knees. You can be running a normal mix of program in Linux including KDE and have lots of memory free and still notice 10, 20, or even 50% swap useage. If you moved some big bunch of files around the system will page out inactive tasks and put them in swap while it uses your ram for file buffers. But it will not page those tasks back in UNTILL they have to run again. So long dormant programs will use swap, even when not much is going on in the machine. The longer your up-time, the more likely this is the case. -- _____________________________________ John Andersen
As I said, you don't really need swap until you really need it. And swap will slow you down; as for when swap it's used, if you run VMWare and you run on the same time 2 linuxes and one Win98SE, you will see a lot of swapping, without enough memory for all of them. Comparing the rate of access from the RAM and harddrives, RAM is always faster (even if you have simple RAM - I have DDRAM FSB333). I didn't say not to use swap :). I just said that with good amount of RAM swap can be limited to only the size of your RAM memory. Regards, Sourian On Sun, 2003-06-15 at 10:38, John Andersen wrote:
On Saturday 14 June 2003 22:46, Sourian wrote:
Swap will also slow your system down, so if you see your system swapping you should consider more ram.
You should be carefull how you say this.
First, its not true that swap will slow your system down.
Secong, there are many ex-windows users that think ANY use of swap is bad and start worrying about swap useage that is a normal part of linux operation.
The truth of the matter is you are way better off if you NEVER pay any attention to swap unless your system is on its knees.
You can be running a normal mix of program in Linux including KDE and have lots of memory free and still notice 10, 20, or even 50% swap useage. If you moved some big bunch of files around the system will page out inactive tasks and put them in swap while it uses your ram for file buffers.
But it will not page those tasks back in UNTILL they have to run again. So long dormant programs will use swap, even when not much is going on in the machine. The longer your up-time, the more likely this is the case.
-- _____________________________________ John Andersen -- Sourian <sourian@go.ro>
The 03.06.15 at 09:46, Sourian wrote:
The old/safe ;-) school will teach you that you need a swap doubling your RAM, and this is true is you run linux on an very old machine, with small memory. I myself am happy with the same amount.
That really applied to windows - I have a pentium machine with 32 Mb of ram and perhaps 600 mb swap, ie, 20 times :-) For linux, just have as much swap as you need - which is not very helpfull, I know.
As for partitioning, if you want to repartition your entire hard drive you should first run fdisk /mbr to clean the Master Boot Record which was written by SuSE and Win98 has problem reading it (!!!pay atention fdisk /mbr has to be run after booting from the rescue disk and WILL ERASE YOUR ENTIRE PARTITION TABLE, so you will lose all partitions - make backup).
Are you sure? I don't think it erases partitions tables, only the mbr boot program. -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson
On Sunday 15 June 2003 02:34, cxiii - wrote:
When I installed SuSe I went with the default install. I have a 14 gig hard drive and 320mb of RAM. My problem is is that I left it default when installing it and it created a 640mb swap partition. In the manual it says that I wouldn?t really need that much of a swap drive considering they were thought of when memory was small. When I went to the Linux Documentation Project and downloaded one of thier documents, it talked about it as if necessary to have a large swap partition.
Which one is right? I?d like to cut it in half to save space. I tried to reinstall everything with Win98 starup disk and fdisk didn?t recognize the logical partition anyway and was fruitless. I keep a 3 gig partition for 98 only because there?s a few games I want to finish. Otherwise I?m sold with Linux and can get around pretty well. I have a k62 450. Get it, this is 2 questions.
William Fisher -- ==================
William, In reading the manuals included with SuSE, it has mention of this thing you call swap. I believe, if memory serves me, that with the new machines with large ram as yours is, only 256k swap is ever needed. That should be plenty on your setup as well or you can just half your present amount to equal your ram, if you like. Check your manuals for further clarification on swap. Patrick -- --- KMail v1.5.2 --- SuSE Linux Pro v8.2 --- Registered Linux User #225206 On any other day, that might seem strange...
participants (5)
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BandiPat -
Carlos E. R. -
cxiii - -
John Andersen -
Sourian