My residence is in South Australia, however I am now in the UK for about 3 months.
We found out the day before Christmas that our Daughter-in-Law in the UK had bone cancer in her spine which was a secondary cancer from breast cancer that she had some years ago. She has one child who is now 2 years old. So we had to, at short notice, travel to the UK to lend support to our UK family.
I only have my trusty Laptop (ASUS R501VM) with me and no other Computer on which to try new distributions. I do not want to alter the partitions on this Laptop, so I decided to install 15.04 on a 32GB USB 3.0 flash drive. The following list of problems may be related to the write performance of the Kingston Datatraveler 111 flash drive which has a write speed about 20% slower than the read speed. Even if this is the case, I think the software should behave correctly and allow for slow drive I/O conditions.
I must say that after overcoming most of the following problems, I am very impressed with the speed of vivid and how quickly it is developing. I hope that this posting helps improve the performance of vivid.
MY PROBLEM LIST
The first problem that I encountered was that for each installation attempt, I found that the installation hung when I advance to the Disk Setup. It gives no options for disk setup and when I looked at the processes with System Monitor, I could not see any processes related to the disk setup. Every time this happens, I just exit the process with the “X” and start it again and, voila, I get the disk setup menu, so I can advance as normal – well maybe.
The second problem that I encountered was that Screen Locking was enabled and I had to constantly come and unlock it to find out the progress. Because of the frustration that this caused me, I removed Screen Locking in System Settings > Desktop Behaviour. So I could now watch the progress.
The third problem that I encountered was related to the fact that I no longer needed to nurse the installation. I could go away and get on with other activities. Under these conditions, when I returned, the screen was black and non-responsive to any keyboard or mouse input. I did yet another download of a more recent iso file and had another go. The stall of the installation happened again. So I learned from this to just sat through the installation process, making sure that I did something on the keyboard or mouse every now and then. Thankfully the installation went through to the end – hurray!!!
The fourth problem occurred on my first installation attempt. I decided to use the option “Guided – use entire disk”, ie my Kingston DataTraveller 111 32GB flash drive. After using this system, I was puzzled by the fact that I could only access about 13GB of memory. After checking what was going on, I found that about half the disk was allocated to a swap file! This was solved by downloading another iso and installing with the manual option for the disk partitions. After subsequent re-installations related to the above problems, I found that I did not need to have a swap file on the flash drive as 15.04 was using the swap file on my Laptop's SSD. Using that option gave more memory for my home partition which then resulted in more problems.
The fifth problem resulted from copying large directories from my SSD home directory into the home directory for vivid. When the message came that the copy was complete, I then closed down and when I rebooted, the system failed to come up, just a black screen. On one occasion I waited a while and the hplip-gui reported that there was no system tray. It was not after repeated re-installations did I realize that after a copy is completed there is a process that utilizes about 30% of my CPU for some time (ie eight 2.3GHz processors). I can close down if this has been running for some time and then start again. This time I let the grub 10s time expire and then proceed with login and wait for that to complete. I then have a usable system. The lesson I learned from this was that after a copy is complete, start the System Monitor and wait until the CPU usage drops to less than 10%. On some occasions vivid fails to start after the login step and I get a black screen. If this happens, I wait for the completion of grub and then let the login menu be there for a few minutes before login.
The sixth problem is that Dolphin does not complete the copy of individual files. I noticed this particularly when I had files that could not be copied due to protection issues. When I removed these problems, the directory sizes are still not the same in some cases, but the number of files is. This is illustrated in the attached graphic. I only notice this problem with copying large directories. The iso file that I used for this system is dated 30 January 2015.
We found out the day before Christmas that our Daughter-in-Law in the UK had bone cancer in her spine which was a secondary cancer from breast cancer that she had some years ago. She has one child who is now 2 years old. So we had to, at short notice, travel to the UK to lend support to our UK family.
I only have my trusty Laptop (ASUS R501VM) with me and no other Computer on which to try new distributions. I do not want to alter the partitions on this Laptop, so I decided to install 15.04 on a 32GB USB 3.0 flash drive. The following list of problems may be related to the write performance of the Kingston Datatraveler 111 flash drive which has a write speed about 20% slower than the read speed. Even if this is the case, I think the software should behave correctly and allow for slow drive I/O conditions.
I must say that after overcoming most of the following problems, I am very impressed with the speed of vivid and how quickly it is developing. I hope that this posting helps improve the performance of vivid.
MY PROBLEM LIST
The first problem that I encountered was that for each installation attempt, I found that the installation hung when I advance to the Disk Setup. It gives no options for disk setup and when I looked at the processes with System Monitor, I could not see any processes related to the disk setup. Every time this happens, I just exit the process with the “X” and start it again and, voila, I get the disk setup menu, so I can advance as normal – well maybe.
The second problem that I encountered was that Screen Locking was enabled and I had to constantly come and unlock it to find out the progress. Because of the frustration that this caused me, I removed Screen Locking in System Settings > Desktop Behaviour. So I could now watch the progress.
The third problem that I encountered was related to the fact that I no longer needed to nurse the installation. I could go away and get on with other activities. Under these conditions, when I returned, the screen was black and non-responsive to any keyboard or mouse input. I did yet another download of a more recent iso file and had another go. The stall of the installation happened again. So I learned from this to just sat through the installation process, making sure that I did something on the keyboard or mouse every now and then. Thankfully the installation went through to the end – hurray!!!
The fourth problem occurred on my first installation attempt. I decided to use the option “Guided – use entire disk”, ie my Kingston DataTraveller 111 32GB flash drive. After using this system, I was puzzled by the fact that I could only access about 13GB of memory. After checking what was going on, I found that about half the disk was allocated to a swap file! This was solved by downloading another iso and installing with the manual option for the disk partitions. After subsequent re-installations related to the above problems, I found that I did not need to have a swap file on the flash drive as 15.04 was using the swap file on my Laptop's SSD. Using that option gave more memory for my home partition which then resulted in more problems.
The fifth problem resulted from copying large directories from my SSD home directory into the home directory for vivid. When the message came that the copy was complete, I then closed down and when I rebooted, the system failed to come up, just a black screen. On one occasion I waited a while and the hplip-gui reported that there was no system tray. It was not after repeated re-installations did I realize that after a copy is completed there is a process that utilizes about 30% of my CPU for some time (ie eight 2.3GHz processors). I can close down if this has been running for some time and then start again. This time I let the grub 10s time expire and then proceed with login and wait for that to complete. I then have a usable system. The lesson I learned from this was that after a copy is complete, start the System Monitor and wait until the CPU usage drops to less than 10%. On some occasions vivid fails to start after the login step and I get a black screen. If this happens, I wait for the completion of grub and then let the login menu be there for a few minutes before login.
The sixth problem is that Dolphin does not complete the copy of individual files. I noticed this particularly when I had files that could not be copied due to protection issues. When I removed these problems, the directory sizes are still not the same in some cases, but the number of files is. This is illustrated in the attached graphic. I only notice this problem with copying large directories. The iso file that I used for this system is dated 30 January 2015.
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