coverup Posted January 23, 2004 Report Share Posted January 23, 2004 I'm going to put linux on the new laptop (arrives soon). How much space should I allocate to the swap partition? I read somewhere that the rule is 2x(capacity of the RAM) but not bigger than 512Mb. The laptop will have 1Gb, so should it be 512Mb, or 2Gb? Also, I'm going to put linux alongside WinXP. The harddrive will apparently have NTFS on it. Will linux be able to write files on it, or will I have to create a dummy FAT32 partition for sharing files between linux and XP? Since I installed linux for the first time 4 years ago, Win always got the flick from me. It will be my first dualboot... Funny, isn't it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pzatch Posted January 23, 2004 Report Share Posted January 23, 2004 (edited) Keep the dummy FAT32 partition to keep things bug free. As for the swap partitioin I would go with the 512mb one. Never had a problem with Mandrake even using my 256mb swap. I't never really come close to using it all and I only have 128 mb of mem. Make sure your hardware is supported and make sure you read a little here on partitioning with XP. There are many posts on that one. Edited January 23, 2004 by Pzatch Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ezroller Posted January 23, 2004 Report Share Posted January 23, 2004 I agree. having the fat32 partition will be good. as I understand it, there is no support for ntfs. 512 will be plenty also. I have 2 gigs in my linux box at work, and I never fill it up. I come close, but never over. I'm pretty sure that it will use whatever you make available. Besides, the 2xRAM rule was made long after gigs of ram were ever a feasable option. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coverup Posted January 23, 2004 Author Report Share Posted January 23, 2004 How can you tell how much space is being used on swap? I usually check free space with kdiskfree, but it doesn't show swap... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ezroller Posted January 23, 2004 Report Share Posted January 23, 2004 I use the program gkrellm for that. there's a memory screen on it. if you click on the screen, it will tell you what you are using. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coverup Posted January 23, 2004 Author Report Share Posted January 23, 2004 My desktop has 512Mb RAM and approx 1Gb swap... gkrellm says that 902M available and 780Mb used... So linux does need swap nearly twice as big as RAM, right? Do I really have to waist 2Gb for swap? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted January 23, 2004 Report Share Posted January 23, 2004 (edited) My desktop has 512Mb RAM and approx 1Gb swap... gkrellm says that 902M available and 780Mb used... So linux does need swap nearly twice as big as RAM, right? Do I really have to waist 2Gb for swap? then you have problems.....big time! Open a terminal and do free -m [root@ml root]# free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 250 239 10 0 17 80 -/+ buffers/cache: 140 109 Swap: 203 0 203 [root@ml root]# 256MB RAM 200MB swap my swap is free, but I just booted and hour ago so that'll change. Look out if msec or updatedb runs. Swap gets eaten alive. Edited January 23, 2004 by bvc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coverup Posted January 23, 2004 Author Report Share Posted January 23, 2004 Nnop, msec is not running # ps -x |grep msec 8610 pts/5 S 0:00 grep msec Well, last time I did reboot a (long) while ago... But isn't the beauty of linux that you don't have to reboot just to free memory/swap? Is there a way to free swap without rebooting? BTW, I am running VMware session right now, could that be the reason why swap is nearly full? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coverup Posted January 23, 2004 Author Report Share Posted January 23, 2004 After closing the VMWare session, I got back only few Mb... will try reboot... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coverup Posted January 23, 2004 Author Report Share Posted January 23, 2004 closed gkrellm, ghostview, evolution and firebird, (both were open a long time ago), and guess what - I got my swap back! The swap usage has fallen from 86% to 9% used. Now I'm curious which application is to be blamed? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted January 23, 2004 Report Share Posted January 23, 2004 (edited) Could be vmware, I d/k. Msec and updatedb aren't running sevices. They run, do the deed, and stop. You know when they are running because the cpu pegs 100% for 5 minutes and you can't do much til they are done. Edited January 23, 2004 by bvc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coverup Posted January 23, 2004 Author Report Share Posted January 23, 2004 I'd thought so, but it's more likely that firebird and kde are misbehaving... Exiting vmware returned only 8Mb or so... by closing firebird and evo I claimed back nearly 75% of swap. I still had 85Mb of swap used. Peanuts, but... So I decided to reboot. I closed KDE, and got another 50Mb back. After rebooting, 0 swap was used until I started firebird again...opened a couple of tabs, and here we go - 2Mb of swap gone... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iphitus Posted January 23, 2004 Report Share Posted January 23, 2004 you can have XP installed on a FAT partition, this would avoid the need to have an extra partition. And as for NTFS support, there is read and write suppoer, however the write is experimental and it isnt reccomended to be used - it works, but there's a slim chance of data loss, but imho, it's probably better ntfs support than early NT versions :P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andrewski Posted January 23, 2004 Report Share Posted January 23, 2004 coverup, Yeah, firebird will do that to you. Did it to me anyway. I'd recommend trying Opera. ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted January 23, 2004 Report Share Posted January 23, 2004 somewhere in kcontrol you can, to an extend, specify the resources that kde uses. Still, I've been using kernel-2.6 and kde-3.2beta and after msec and friends run only 2/3 of my 200mb swap is used. If any app uses 500-700mb of swap, it has a mem leak no doubt, with the exception of emulation which I could see being made to work off swap, I guess. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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