one more linux user

[SteveRiley]

With one exception: if you plan to use hibernation (suspend to disk), you need a swap area (which I think needs to be a partition) that is at least as large as your installed RAM.

Yup, that's the only reason I keep a swap partition around. But lately I've begun wondering whether that's even necessary. I find that resuming from hibernation takes more time than a cold boot.

[Snowhog]

I think that establishing a swap partition is a function of 'conditioning'. I have a swap partition, but I never Hibernate my laptop - ever. My swap is never used. Could I get rid of it and use the disk space? Yes. Am I going to? Likely not (conditioning you know!).

[Jonas]

I suspect the installation problem was with the ATI graphics of the Radeon.

The specs of the Acer Aspire M5100 should not have caused any problems in regards to processors or 64-bit vs 32-bit issues.

The "nomodeset" Grub2 boot option to solve the graphics problem (as discussed elsewhere) can be used to install Kubuntu to a working state, and then fiddling with flgrx vs. ATI proprietary graphics drivers can be done (once the system is at least running using the VESA drivers).

Regarding Vesa/ATI/Radeon - Yes, this is what I've done in the past but never with a fresh install. and as mentioned above as far as I understood the mint installation I was about to do the vesa drivers didn't work when I was going to install it. Could it be because Mint depend on some propriety modules?

Jonas

[oshunluvr]

I think that establishing a swap partition is a function of 'conditioning'. I have a swap partition, but I never Hibernate my laptop - ever. My swap is never used. Could I get rid of it and use the disk space? Yes. Am I going to? Likely not (conditioning you know!).

I still have swap space on my desktop with 8GB of RAM. I was about to remove it when I discovered tmpfs can swap to it too. Since I mount tmpfs in ram, I decided to keep the swap space too - just in case. I have plenty (read: TBs not GBs) of hard drive space so that's not an issue.

As far as the comment about what normal people are doing that uses so much RAM?

I regularly am running a couple VM's while listening to Amarok and either burning or ripping a DVD. This would also include email and web browsing at the same time and frequently accessing one of the other computers on my network. I am a true multi-tasker! 4GB of RAM didn't cut it. However, I have yet to fill the 8GB I upgraded to a couple of years back.

I suppose I may not be a "normal" user!

[SteveRiley]

As it is, I could hold about 14 copies of the Old and New Testament in RAM at one time, each one taking about 500Mb.

Someday soon, I'm sure, we'll be measuring memory capacities not in gigabytes but instead in kilotestaments

[Snowhog]

Manabytes. Divine RAM.

[capt-zero]

Cubit kilometrige? Or for difference engines gear feet?

[GreyGeek]

An elderly lady who got yet another virus in her email, even with active AV, got tired of changing her passwords on her financial accounts yet again, and asked me to install Linux. Chalk up another one!

[Guest]

I was able to both boot a number of Puppy Linux live CD distros as well as install them on the Seagate 120 MB hard drive of my Aspire 5100 with AMD Turion 64 cpu and 768 MB RAM. It boots and runs blazing fast on old equipment like this. It will even load in RAM from a live CD if you have 384 MB plus.

Most Puppy Linuxes require less than 400 MB harddisk space including Open/Libre Office to create or edit Microsoft Office docs.

HaRo and Wary Puppies worked great as well as the U.S. DoD distro, LPS 2012. Some Puppy Linuxes were not able to find the wifi card in the Aspire 5100.

Regards

[dmeyer]

I might be speaking absolute bull and I will be duly berated for it by a neckbeard (Good thing thisn't a Gentoo forum or I'd be expelled) but If you are running with less than 4GB I would stick to 32 bit installations because 64bit installs tend to use ~20% more ram than 32bit installs. I'm too lazy to dig up sources right now but I;m fairly sure this is true.

[luckyone]

I switched to 64 bit for my main OS about a year ago. I still test/try 32 bit, but I'm doing a lot less distro-hopping the last 5 years due to bandwidth constraints.

As for why? VMs run a lot better for me. And what little transcoding I do is faster also. There was a time when 64 bit was less usable. That time is gone.

[benny_fletch]

I might be speaking absolute bull and I will be duly berated for it by a neckbeard (Good thing thisn't a Gentoo forum or I'd be expelled) but If you are running with less than 4GB I would stick to 32 bit installations because 64bit installs tend to use ~20% more ram than 32bit installs. I'm too lazy to dig up sources right now but I;m fairly sure this is true.

You are correct.

The main disadvantage of 64-bit architectures is that, relative to 32-bit architectures, the same data occupies more space in memory (due to longer pointers and possibly other types, and alignment padding). This increases the memory requirements of a given process and can have implications for efficient processor cache utilization.

More information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit_...-bit_vs_64-bit

[luckyone]

I almost forgot to mention that if you have 64-bit compatibility problems and you have to use 32-bit then you can install a PAE kernel and address more than the 3.2 GB or so that a standard kernel can.
I haven't checked lately but there are probably some distributions that have a PAE kernel as standard.

[SteveRiley]

PAE is the default for Ubuntu from 12.10 onwards.

[luckyone]

I know it's starting to happen elsewhere also. I remember having to install smp. It wasn't that long ago. Except in old guy years.