Gregg's Nearly Interminable Adventures in Linux Land

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Dngrsone

Computer motherboards tend to have memory slots in groups of two for the simple reason that a matched pair of 'sticks' can operate faster when in matching slots. On laptops, it's usually only two slots, but on desktop systems it's generally four, though I have seen lower-end systems with only a pair and higher-end ones with six or even eight slots.

As an additional consideration, you want matching RAM speeds overall if possible. RAM has steadily increased in how fast it can be accessed, to keep up with faster CPUs, and it's possible to have RAM sticks of different speeds that can be installed and work in the same machine. RAM sticks of the same speed should be installed in matching slots for best performance, and system speed will be limited to that of the slowest RAM in the system. So a little research is needed to see what speed RAM is required. (There's no benefit to getting faster RAM than needed, but there is a cost to having slower RAM than the system can use, even if it works.)

I had a problem with wearing out Flash memory sticks some ten years ago (here's a good idea: don't run a portable app on one that will use the drive as a cache). I actually still have a Kingston from back then which I had replaced some four or five times through warranty (back when the warranty was unlimited). The number of permissible writes is much higher nowadays, but I find that I don't need to worry about wearing out a thumb drive anymore because I just don't use them as much these days.

Flash thumb drives are a somewhat different matter than SSDs, though the underlying technology is similar. In the early days, people worried about SSDs wearing out. These days, it's not a likely issue.

I haven't had a thumbdrive wear out, but my usage tends to be read only. They are archival storage for less used files, and tend to be read from far more than written to. I have a seven port USB hub in my desktop with an assortment of thumb drives from 32GB to 128 GB holding various data, each dedicated to particular types of storage.

Agreed, for portable apps, I'd take pains to see that cache wasn't on the thumbdrive the apps were on.

On the desktop, I have 8GB RAM installed (the max this particular machine will take.) I found an open source RAMdisk driver for 64bit Windows, and dedicated 512MB to a ramdisk seen as Z: I have Firefox place its cache there, and have the Firefox profile on the ramdisk as well. To the extent feasible, other caches and temp files are directed to the ramdrive as well. A lesser motive is reducing writes to the SSD. The bigger win is simply better overall performance. (It's possible to define and use a ramdrive in Linux, too, though I haven't at this point.)

And I discovered an interesting quirk. My machine is USB2, and doesn't support USB3. For my purposes, this isn't a limitation - the stuff I do doesn't require USB3 speeds accessing external peripherals. But when I got a 128GB thumbdrive, it was USB3 because it didn't come in a USB2 model. I use it as my Calibre Library mirror, and update it with a file sync utility when I make changes in the master on HD. The previous drive used for this had been a 64GB USB2. Mirror operations were a lot faster on the USB3 drive, even though the underlying system is USB2. It was faster media, and could be accessed and updated faster than the USB2 drive it replaced. The limit had been media speed on the older drive, not bandwidth of the USB interface.
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Dennis

[arjaybe]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

4GB is probably adequate, but more is better.

Ubuntu tries to do everything in RAM. It allocates a swap area to handle cases where there isn't enough physical RAM to satisfy demand. Like other current OSes, RAM is divided into 4K pages, and if more RAM is needed than available, pages not recently used are moved to the swap partition, and the OS keeps a table of which pages are swapped out. If something tried to access a swapped out page, a "page fault" occurs and the page is swapped back in. Total memory is considered to be physical memory plus the size of the allocated swap file.

What you really want is that swap stays blissfully unused, and there's enough physical RAM.to handle demand for best performance.

Since one use Greg mentions is image editing, I'd want to install more RAM. That tends to be a RAM intensive process.
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Dennis

Understood. I have 4GB and never touch swap. I rarely see my RAM usage over 1GB, and then it's usually because I have Virtualbox running. Like you, I believe in having lots of freeboard, but I don't think Gregg is going to swamp 4GB even with "light" video editing. If it really is cheap and easily available and easily installed and so on, going for 8GB is fine. If it's the least bit of hassle though, I say forget it.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by arjaybe

Understood. I have 4GB and never touch swap. I rarely see my RAM usage over 1GB, and then it's usually because I have Virtualbox running. Like you, I believe in having lots of freeboard, but I don't think Gregg is going to swamp 4GB even with "light" video editing. If it really is cheap and easily available and easily installed and so on, going for 8GB is fine. If it's the least bit of hassle though, I say forget it.

My previous desktop was a dual core 32 bit machine built from components.

In that system, 4GB was the max the system could hold, and the max the installed OSes (WinXP and Ubuntu) could use because it was 32 bit.

Windows could only see/use 3.2GB of it for technical reasons. I found a freeware ramdisk driver that could use the extra ram Windows could,'t access, and had a 768MB ramdrive seen as Z: that I used for things like Firefox profile and cache. Sped things up a treat. Linux didn't have that limit and saw all 4GB. I saw little or no swap use in either OS.

But one factor is usage pattern. I tend to do one thing at a time. My primary application is Firefox, and it's usually the active major app in either OS. If I was running several major apps and switching between them, that would change RAM requirements. Linux wants to keep everything in RAM, and I could easily exhaust physical RAM and wind up hitting swap in short order. It's why I maxxed the RAM in the current 64bit machine. What I do now could likely have been accommodated by the 4GB the box came with, but what I might do in the future would be another matter.

How much hassle adding RAM is depends on the user. I know folks who would be lost at sea and ask me to do it for them, but Greg seems like he could handle it.
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Dennis

[arjaybe]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

... Ubuntu ...
How much hassle adding RAM is depends on the user. I know folks who would be lost at sea and ask me to do it for them, but Greg seems like he could handle it.
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Dennis

Keep in mind that Gregg is using Xubuntu, with the XFCE desktop, which has very low RAM requirements. My XFCE install (on 32-bit) uses 130MB on start-up. My 64-bit install uses more -- about 400MB (it has some KDE stuff running at boot, in addition to the extra draw by 64-bit.) I expect Ubuntu uses more, how much I don't know.

I know Gregg can handle it. He's a resourceful guy.-)

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by arjaybe

Keep in mind that Gregg is using Xubuntu, with the XFCE desktop, which has very low RAM requirements. My XFCE install (on 32-bit) uses 130MB on start-up. My 64-bit install uses more -- about 400MB (it has some KDE stuff running at boot, in addition to the extra draw by 64-bit.) I expect Ubuntu uses more, how much I don't know.

I have Ubuntu installed on several machines in multi-boot mode. I haven't tried to measure RAM use lately.

Xubuntu is simply a custom spin of Ubuntu which uses XFCE by default. Lubuntu is a similar spin using Lxde. Kubuntu uses KDE. Standard Ubuntu uses Canonical's Unity environment by default, but you can install and use something else instead, and pick which desktop environment you want from the Login screen.

My old Fujitsu p2110 notebook runs Ubuntu 12.10 with Lxde. It has a whopping 256MB RAM, of which 16MB are grabbed off the top by the Transmeta Cruse CPU for code morphing. I originally installed Xubuntu. It installed without a hitch and ran, but was snail slow. Posters on the Ubuntu forums felt too much Gnome had crept into Xubuntu, and Canonical had a steadily increasing idea of what "low end" was. They recommended what I did: reinstall from scratch from the Minimal CD to get a working CLI installation, then use apt-get to cherry pick what I wanted. Lxde was the lightest weight desktop environment, and it brought Xorg with it. The result was a working GUI system with bearable performance, especially when installed on an ext4 file system.

It's staying at 12.10. I hosed the system and had to redo from scratch attempting to do a version upgrade from that. The upgrade went fine till the last step. The new kernel required PAE support, the p2110 didn't have it, and the kernel install failed. This caused a cascade failure and an effectively unusable system on reboot. I really think if PAE support was a requirement that a test for that be done first and the upgrade cancelled if it wasn't present, but the folks creating the upgrade apparently never thought it might occur on a non-PAE system.

My 32 bit Acer netbook came with WinXP. I repartitioned and installed Ubuntu on it, too, again using Lubuntu on ext4. Performance on a 1.6mhx dual cote Atom CPU with 1.5GB RAM is acceptable. It would handle XFCE, but Lxde is a decent enough fit for what I do to serve my needs.

My 64bit desktop uses standard Ubuntu, but I tend to boot into Lxde or XFCE as better fits for the way I work. I looked at a lot of desktops along the way, and have Gnome Classic, Enlightenment, and a few other things as well when I feel like playing.

I know Gregg can handle it. He's a resourceful guy.-)

He can likely live with installed RAM now, but future needs may change.
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Dennis

[arjaybe]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I have Ubuntu installed on several machines in multi-boot mode. I haven't tried to measure RAM use lately.
Dennis

As an experimenter, have you tried antiX or MX?

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by arjaybe

As an experimenter, have you tried antiX or MX?

Nope. So many OSes. So little time.

(Depending on which machine I'm pointing at, I have Android Froyo, Android Jellybean, FreeDOS, Mac OS Classic, Ubuntu Linux, Puppy Linux, Palm OS Garnet, Solaris, Unix System V, Win2K, WinXP, Win7, Win10, and Win2003 server.)

I installed Ubuntu because it did the best job I'd seen in a distro of figuring out what it was running on, setting itself up, and Just Working. I prefer to spend my time using the machine, not fiddling to make it usable.

I may get around to other flavors of Linux again, but I spend more time in Windows than in Linux, since much of what I do is Windows centric, so experimentation these days is more concerned with making Windows behave as desired. (Generally speaking, I can.)

In that line, I'm fascinated by this: Microsoft and Canonical partner to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10

The reaction from various Linux partisans should be amusing...
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Dennis

[eschwartz]

If RAM is that much of a desperate concern that you need to jump desktops, why not settle for some lightweight window manager, say, dwm. It runs in ~1 MB of memory.

[arjaybe]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

In that line, I'm fascinated by this: Microsoft and Canonical partner to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10

The reaction from various Linux partisans should be amusing...
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Dennis

As I understand it, some userland programs for their Linux developers working on their cloud services. Running on Win10.

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by Dngrsone

Gregg,

Computer motherboards tend to have memory slots in groups of two for the simple reason that a matched pair of 'sticks' can operate faster when in matching slots. On laptops, it's usually only two slots, but on desktop systems it's generally four, though I have seen lower-end systems with only a pair and higher-end ones with six or even eight slots.

Right now, I wouldn't run a machine without at least 8GB of RAM (older systems may not be able to do this, consult the owner's manual, YMMV, etc). I always recommend buying memory in matched pairs for the reasons I mentioned above. I have a lot of Crucial in my machines; and I have a lot of low-capacity 'spares' littering my garage... one day I'll make jewelry or something out of them.

I had a problem with wearing out Flash memory sticks some ten years ago (here's a good idea: don't run a portable app on one that will use the drive as a cache). I actually still have a Kingston from back then which I had replaced some four or five times through warranty (back when the warranty was unlimited). The number of permissible writes is much higher nowadays, but I find that I don't need to worry about wearing out a thumb drive anymore because I just don't use them as much these days.

Hey Dngrsone,

Eight slots, wow. Probably one of those 64GB gaming machines.

Ha ha--you probably made Kingston re-think their warranty!

I like Crucial. That's what I got when I added a stick to my computer. But that was when the computer was Windows before I converted it to Xubuntu. Crucial does this "guarantee" that the memory will work. You download their little program and it runs and tells you just what you need. Nice. Only thing is they don't do it for Linux computers. So how do I know that the memory I buy for my Linux computer will work? (Or do I ever know?)

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I know folks who would be lost at sea and ask me to do it for them, but Greg seems like he could handle it.
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Dennis

Ha ha, Dennis, thanks for the vote of confidence!

[eschwartz]

Their little program thing was designed to tell you what to buy, not what will work.
It scans the hardware to see what is compatible and tells you which is the best quality compatible RAM that they sell.

By "incompatible", what is really meant is "the motherboard doesn't support the maximum speed of the RAM, so it will run slower -- at the max speed supported by the motherboard".
RAM which is faster than your system supports costs more for no gain, in other words.

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by arjaybe

Keep in mind that Gregg is using Xubuntu, with the XFCE desktop, which has very low RAM requirements. My XFCE install (on 32-bit) uses 130MB on start-up. My 64-bit install uses more -- about 400MB (it has some KDE stuff running at boot, in addition to the extra draw by 64-bit.) I expect Ubuntu uses more, how much I don't know.

I know Gregg can handle it. He's a resourceful guy.-)

Hey RJB. I think you're right--I can't see needing more than 4GB RAM. I've done the video editing with two GB and yeah it was a little slow but very manageable. Like Dennis said, it would be nice to have more. But it would also be nice to be dating Megan Fox.

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by arjaybe

As an experimenter, have you tried antiX or MX?

Thanks to you I've got MX14 on one of my ancient laptops (Dell Latitude 550). I only use the laptops for word processing. The MX14 is great. I love it. But now (while not abandoning the MX14 on the one machine) I'm looking for something even lighter (so I can put a later version of LO on it). Any suggestions?

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Their little program thing was designed to tell you what to buy, not what will work.
It scans the hardware to see what is compatible

Isn't that telling you what will work?

Originally Posted by eschwartz

and tells you which is the best quality compatible RAM that they sell.

By "incompatible", what is really meant is "the motherboard doesn't support the maximum speed of the RAM, so it will run slower -- at the max speed supported by the motherboard".
RAM which is faster than your system supports costs more for no gain, in other words.

So any RAM will work in any machine but if you get say DDR4 RAM for a motherboard that will only support DDR2 you're wasting your money?