Gregg's Nearly Interminable Adventures in Linux Land

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM24sPbdURQ

Warn people about just what you are inflicting on them!

(Carefully resisting the temptation to respond in kind. I own 1,200 vinyl LPs, and will guarantee to trump just about anyone in a game of "You think that's bad? Listen to this!")
______
Dennis

[arjaybe]

DMcCunney
You have Linux itself and the disk cache it maintains occupying RAM before you even start to load programs and do work.

Linux takes virtually all of the RAM and caches it. Then it doles it out as required. The correct way to measure actual RAM usage in Linux is after subtracting the cache.

[Dngrsone]

I have looked at Tiny Core Linux, and I will likely give it a go, when I have time to assemble one... I still have to fix my bootable USB drive after my last repair fiasco.

Hm, I really should find time to do that-- my boss relies on me to hack into some of the older laptops when they come in for repair, and I currently can't use the drive. :/

[cromag]

Four or five years ago I took my daughter to the Trenton Computer Festival. (it's just a shadow of it's former self, thanks largely to the internet, I suspect.) She wanted to use her own money to buy her own computer.

We found an ancient Compaq Pressario laptop -- I believe it dated from 1999 or 2000. It had a 6 GB hard drive. The dealer plugged it in to show that it worked. I can't remember the price -- it was cheap. (I gave her a new battery for it -- cost more than the computer.)

Anyway, we found a distro called wattOS. It's a very lightweight Linux and was very, very usable on that ancient PC. She had a word processor and spreadsheet for school and, with a $5 USB wi-fi dongle, she was on Facebook.

Just another "small" Linux to consider.

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

What would probbly help is doing what I did -- buying a $20 upgrade to 2 GB RAM.

Check on http://Crucial.com to see what kind of upgrades are compatible with your system, then price shop or it on Newegg, Amazon, Ebay, etc.

Memory is pretty cheap, and also the best way to give a computer a speed boost.

Hey eschwartz, I think perfectionism is taking over. My LO works fine after maybe five minutes. It does jump around in the screen now and then (quite an interesting feature) but that's another story.

I did go to Crucial for one of my desktops. I got rid of a 1.2MB stick and replaced it with a 1GB to bring the total RAM to 2GB. Works great. Didn't even get it for the other identical desktop and that one works really just as well. (I've done some heavy stuff on the 2GB machine and it's never let me down. I love Linux! (My XP was always crashing.))

I thought crucial.com was great. Ran their compatibility scan. Chatted online with a service rep and bought the stick for $26. Would recommend Crucial to anybody. (And got a (one of those 'as long as you bought...') flash drive (8GB) for $5.)

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Possible, but unlikely. They were looking for donations to help fund development and more folks to get involved in development, and neither was forthcoming. (Sigil was a masters thesis in Computer Science project for the original author. It impressed Google enough that they hired him, so his time to do much more on it is limited.)

I think after I get done learning from you for another couple of months I'll be able to take over Sigil.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Probably not enough to matter. Linux likes RAM, and you need more. There are distros like Puppy and Tiny Core that will run in 125MB RAM, but that's for suitable values of "run"

My p2110 is an example. It has 256MB RAM, but the CPU grabs 16MB off the top. Puppy itself runs pretty well, but apps of any size are another matter. Things like LO take a long time to load and aren't the quickest things in creation once up.

The problem is that there isn't enough RAM to hold everything, so the system has to do a lot of swapping to the swap partition. That's slow. You have Linux itself and the disk cache it maintains occupying RAM before you even start to load programs and do work. (And the p2110 has a relatively slow IDE4 HD which is a BIOS limitation, and that makes it worse.) The biggest thing you can do is minimize disk access.

You didn't say anything else about the system other than low RAM, so it's hard to give advice, but the first thing I'd do is give it more RAM. 512MB would be nice. More would be better. (How much it can take will depend on exactly what make/model it is.) Crucial.com and memoryx.com are where I would look to get more RAM. They probably have memory that will work in your machine. The issue will be cost. For instance, I can still get a 128MB daughtercard to take my p2110 to 384MB, but it costs too much to be worth doing. Memory for older systems is a lot more expensive per MB than for newer ones.

I tried Xubuntu on the p2110, and it was snail slow. Posters on the Ubuntu forums suggested that too much Gnome had crept into Xubuntu, and that Canonical had a steadily increasing idea of what "low end" was. They suggested what I did - get and install from the Minimal CD, which gave me a working command line environment (including networking, which can be a major PITA to get working.) I could then use apt-get to install what I needed. I installed Lxde, which is about the lightest weight GUI, and that brought Xorg, the X-Windows framework with it.) From there I could pick and choose other things. The result was not a speed demon, but was usable.

See what a RAM upgrade would cost, and decide what's it's worth to you.
______

Like I was telling eschwartz I got a 1GB memory stick from Crucial for $26. Now I have 2GB on my Dell that's running Xubuntu and it's a beast! LOL I can only imagine what it would be like to have a 16GB RAM machine. I could run all NSA's computers.

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

(Carefully resisting the temptation to respond in kind. I own 1,200 vinyl LPs, and will guarantee to trump just about anyone in a game of "You think that's bad? Listen to this!")
______
Dennis

Oh, such a thinly veiled warning! I too have a ton of LPs. Here you go (a shot over the bow) Bonnie Tyler "It's a Heartache." (I rest my case. Don't even think of responding!)

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by cromag

Four or five years ago I took my daughter to the Trenton Computer Festival. (it's just a shadow of it's former self, thanks largely to the internet, I suspect.) She wanted to use her own money to buy her own computer.

We found an ancient Compaq Pressario laptop -- I believe it dated from 1999 or 2000. It had a 6 GB hard drive. The dealer plugged it in to show that it worked. I can't remember the price -- it was cheap. (I gave her a new battery for it -- cost more than the computer.)

Anyway, we found a distro called wattOS. It's a very lightweight Linux and was very, very usable on that ancient PC. She had a word processor and spreadsheet for school and, with a $5 USB wi-fi dongle, she was on Facebook.

Just another "small" Linux to consider.

No one will be able to top this, cromag!

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by cromag

Anyway, we found a distro called wattOS. It's a very lightweight Linux and was very, very usable on that ancient PC. She had a word processor and spreadsheet for school and, with a $5 USB wi-fi dongle, she was on Facebook.

Does your daughter still use the machine? Which WP and SS? AbiWord and Gnumeric? I like her attitude, and it sounds like what she got was an appropriate solution for for her.

Just another "small" Linux to consider.

I'm aware of wattOS, but haven't tried it. I note they have a microWATT flavor for even lower end hardware. Among other things, it replaces Chromium as the browser with Qupzilla. Qupzilla is one of an assortment of browsers based on the Webkit backend and Qt framework. I have it here and am impressed. (The Puppy Linux folks are looking at it too. Puppy has historically bundled a a version of Seamonkey 1.x. That's increasingly dated and doesn't handle a lot of current stuff. SeaMonkey 2 does, but is too big. Qupzilla meets Puppy's "First, it must be small" criteria while being standards compliant.)
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

Like I was telling eschwartz I got a 1GB memory stick from Crucial for $26. Now I have 2GB on my Dell that's running Xubuntu and it's a beast! LOL

2GB is a nice environment for Ubuntu. It can run pretty much entirely in RAM and will be quite quick, thanks.

I can only imagine what it would be like to have a 16GB RAM machine. I could run all NSA's computers.

I did say 16 megabytes of RAM for the machine mentioned in an earlier post.

You can get machines with 16GB RAM. At a prior employer, our server of choice was a 1u Dell rackmount with dual Xeon CPUs and 32GB RAM. We ran CentOS under VMWare, and they were good performers.

You can get machines with 6-8 GB running Wi7/8. Whether you need that much will depends on what you do. (If you do video editing or make extensive use of Photoshop, you probably do need that much...)
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

No one will be able to top this, cromag!

Don't make any big bets on that.

Technically, Linux is the Linux kernel - vmlinuz. If it uses a Linux kernel, it's a Linux system. Lots of things use Linux kernels.

Any Android device is a Linux system. Amazon Kindles and B&N Nooks are Linux systems, using custom builds of Android with a UI designed for their use cases. Amazon and B&N make the source code for their firmware available. they have to - Linux is issued under the Gnu Public License, and the GPL requires you to provide source. (People were looking at getting Nook Tablets and Kindle Fires to root them, and get a cheap general purpose Android tablet. I recommended the Nook Tablet. It cost about $50 more than the Fire, but had much better specs, and could take a microSD card for additional storage.)

My former Linksys wireless router was a Linux system, using a Linux 2.6 kernel. Because it was Linux, source was available, and you could hack the router firmware. Various people did, and you have things like DD-WRT, OpenWRT, and CeroWRT which are all alternatives to the stock firmware on Linux based routers. I ran a package called Tomato, which would let me SSH to a command line on the router, and do things like run Busybox vi to diddle config files. (My SO was bemused at me running vi on the router.)

I haven't seen Linux on a smartwatch yet, but it probably exists.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

Oh, such a thinly veiled warning! I too have a ton of LPs. Here you go (a shot over the bow) Bonnie Tyler "It's a Heartache." (I rest my case. Don't even think of responding!)

I actually don't think that Bonnie Tyler song is that bad. I like well-crafted pop, and it was. For that matter, I like Lady Gaga. There's rather more to her than her hit singles might suggest. There's a lovely video of her on YouTube dueting with Tony Bennett on The Lady Is A Tramp, and both are obviously having a wonderful time.
______
Dennis

[cromag]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Does your daughter still use the machine? Which WP and SS? AbiWord and Gnumeric? I like her attitude, and it sounds like what she got was an appropriate solution for for her.
...
Dennis

Yes, AbiWord and Gnumeric. But, no, she doesn't really use it anymore. She just finished her sophomore year at college (majoring in Mechanical Engineering, Minoring in Chinese) and needed something with (much) more "horsepower" -- and greater compatibility with her courses.

The Compaq still works, though.

[cromag]

BTW, I have plastic bins of LPs -- I'm not that far from the Princeton Record Exchange -- and I digitize and "clean them up" as a hobby.

Just in case anyone thinks about starting something!

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by cromag

BTW, I have plastic bins of LPs -- I'm not that far from the Princeton Record Exchange -- and I digitize and "clean them up" as a hobby.

Just in case anyone thinks about starting something!

I'd be curious to know what all you have.

I've thought, off and on, about digitizing mine. The issue is that I wouldn't be satisfied with just dumping the LP to a big MP3 file. I'd want properly separated tracks and the metadata that comes with CDs. And being fussy, I'd want other info too, like who wrote the track, what musicians played on it, and all the other stuff provided on the liner notes. Life is too short.

My collection occupies a 6' x 6' set of shelves on a wall, and encompasses everything save hip-hop and grand opera.
______
Dennis