Swap file...is this correct?

[TheBigGeeUK]

Hi guys,

I've recently removed Win XP installed Kubuntu onto my laptop. Everything seems to work ok (aside from trying to get WEP or WPA working). The thing that is concerning me, is that my laptop takes awhile to boot. Longer than Xp, I was under the impression that Kubuntu would be faster. Applications seem to take awhile to load also.

So having looked around I found the "free" command and found this:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        515880     444812      71068          0      11840     194628
-/+ buffers/cache:     238344     277536
Swap:            0          0          0

Is that right?

By the way my laptop is a Dell Lattitude 840, 1.8 Ghz Pentium 4 with half a gig of RAM (would prefer more! lol).

Any help or guidance guys?

Gee

[sky]

Re: Swap file...is this correct?

Hi,

It's because you didn't create swap partition so it can't use this...
Maybe you should try to find some free space, then create a swap partition and activate it by swapon <name_of_partition>

Not sure, it will solve the trouble with slow behavior...

Cheers

[TheBigGeeUK]

Re: Swap file...is this correct?

Right I've just gone into System Settings/System Administration/Disk & Filesystems and found that a Swap partition was created but it's disabled.

I tried to enable it but it can't create a mount point.

I also tried modifying it and just clicked ok (didn't actually change anything) to which it said the swapon does not have a mount point do you wish to create one? Obviously answered yes, but error message received "Unable to create mount point!"

Any suggestions?

Gee

[TheBigGeeUK]

Re: Swap file...is this correct?

In fact looking at it I have:

• a partition thats 1kb in size (/dev/hda1)
• a partiton thats 18.1 GB ext3 /dev/hda2
• a partition thats 509.9Mb which I'm sure is what I set as swap file when installing(/dev/hda5)
• then some called none, mount point none, type swap (/dev/hda6)

of all of them the only one enabled is my main partition /dev/hda2

How do I get that 509.8 Mb partition to become my swap partition??

Gee

[TheBigGeeUK]

Re: Swap file...is this correct?

Sorted it!

Just amended what was labelled none to device /dev/hda5 rather than /dev/hda6 and enabled it. now works:

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 515880 287448 228432 0 8360 171572
-/+ buffers/cache: 107516 408364
Swap: 522072 0 522072

Don't think it's made much difference to the speed though. But to be fair it's only the boot time that slightly annoying and not the time that an application starts as thats not too bad.

Thanks for you help

Gee

[sky]

Re: Swap file...is this correct?

Hi,

Sorry I was not connected to help more but happy to see that you managed to get it right

For faster boot, you can still try to install an optimised kernel if you didn't (for example i686 and k7), for this, you can look in adept or by CLI with apt-get.

You can also check in the kubuntu wiki for optimization
And finally you can recompile your own kernel and remove unnecessary stuff for the stock one...

Cheers

[TheBigGeeUK]

Re: Swap file...is this correct?

Not a problem Sky. Thanks for you advice, I'll check that out!

Gee