PB 3400C Woes

[Longman, Bill]

> On Tuesday, August 26, 2003, at 11:57  AM, Longman, Bill wrote:
> > [...] you can go the the Opt-F2 window and use the swap space.
> >
> > $ swapon /dev/hda9
> >
> > ought to do the trick. That gave me an extra 64MB for the 
> poor little 
> > gizmo to use and abuse.
> 
> I am curious -- what is meant by this trick? Does it somehow reassign 
> your swap partition? If so, what would be the advantages?

Linux, like other *nixes, uses virtual memory from the hard disk space. When
your system is configured, it sees the swap space available in the
/etc/fstab file. It then mounts that space as swap so unused bits of
programs can hang out on disk instead of running from RAM. Anyway, that's
the jist of the page-file scenario. The point is, that physical RAM +
virtual HD space = total memory available to the kernel.

With our 48MB PB3400's, we're scraping the bottom of the usability barrel.
By adding the extra swap space at the beginning of the install (assuming
it's already formatted as swap space), you can use that partition for its
intended purpose - desperately needed system memory. Just firing up X on my
PB takes up a big chunk of RAM, even with a tiny window manager like
WindowMaker. I have to assume YDL's X install has some similar memory
footprint and with all the work it does figuring out package dependencies,
it might be running out of room for "'cipherin'".

Can't you just hear Jethro Bodine: "Naught plus naught..."

Bill