From: Alfie Costa (agcosta@gis.net)
Date: Tue Apr 03 2001 - 17:24:56 CEST
On Tue, Apr 03, 2001 at 06:06:28PM +0200, Luca wrote:
> ...What size do you suggest for the swap
> partition? As I said earlier, I'm gonna try to run X, so I guess
> this is quite an important setting.
I'd try 16 megs for swap. X as it's usually configured in mu runs
quite slowly in 4 megs, unfortunately.
> The small hd size poses another problem. The full UMSDOS install -
> with all addons - takes up about 42 MB on my desktop (58 MB actually
> occupied, on FAT32): I won't be able to follow your procedure if
> I don't remove something. But if I do so, will I be able to install
> addons later (from the laptop)?
'Ad astra per aspera'...
The thing to do is install a modest system that will fit in what you've got.
Less than 25 megs worth of mu, however you like it.
The addon disks should work with no tweaking, but there is a problem.
Each disk will take around 5 hours to unpack on a low RAM computer.
Why? The disks are compressed with bzip2. Bzip2 needs lots of memory.
Small systems must thrash the swap file to run bzip2, resulting in
many thousands of disk accesses which take hours.
Here are several approaches to this low RAM problem...
1) Convert the bzip2 disks to tgz, and change the unpacking scripts
so they use tgz too.
This may make the files bigger than one disk, because tgz can't
compress as well as bzip2.
Note that you'd want to do any converting on a computer with lots
of RAM.
2) Convert the bzip2 disks to bzip2 disks, but use different command
line switches. If you run 'bzip2 --help' it says...
-1 .. -9 set block size to 100k .. 900k
I did some tests a while ago and seem to recall that a block size of
around 500k worked fine on a low RAM system, but it may be a little
more or less. Sometimes a smaller block size will compress smaller
than a larger.
3) Use a serial or parallel cable to transfer files from another mu system.
If you can do this, the UMSDOS partition might not be necessary.
> And, by the way, what are the best
> candidates for permanent removal (ie. what will definitely crawl,
> apart from X, in 4 MB + swap)?
Lyx (a TeX package), TCL, and WINE.
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