Arch is stubborn

[tyme]

1) arch has more recent packages, which my increase the space they use on your hard drive.

2) as mentioned several times now, arch does not seperate bin and devel stuff. you get it all at once. so unless you have devel packages installed for every single package you have installed on the mandy box, you don't have the same configuration.

 

sound server is running, whether or not you have it working. it's still running.

[arctic]

Ah.. okay. I somehow misread that bin and devel thing. But is does not explain the RAM usage, unless Gnome 2.14 suddenly uses more RAM than 2.10 (it is the opposite way around) and also Fedora and Ubuntu needed less RAM on my box with Gnome 2.14.

 

And my sound server was not running atm of the RAM check. I had it disabled an hour before the check. ;)

 

I am not dissing Arch, I am simply trying to understand that distro. And when I want to know things, I can be a pain in the **** until I get the answer. :)

[phunni]

not sure if this is relevant to your language problem but if you edit /etc/locale.gen (or something like that) and uncomment the line for your locale and then run "locale-gen" then it may help...

[arctic]

THe locale problem is solved and it was a rather stupid mistake on my behalf. When I first set up the, I had actually selected the right one (as in Slackware back then), but I guess instead of typing de_DE.blablabla I typed de-DE blablabla. And that - of course - cannot work. Then I tried all other settings and never got it perfectly configured, until I decided to try them all once more. This time I typed it correctly and voil? , I got a working locale.

 

Will try to fix my soundcard today and examine further why Arch uses more RAM on my system. :)

 

top results on Mandriva (rounded values):

Xorg: 18 MB

Nautilus: 19 MB

init: 0,5 MB

hald: 2,3 MB

gam-server: 1,3 MB

Net-applet: 16 MB

Metacity: 9,5 MB

wnck-applet: 9,8 MB

udevd: 0,5 MB

gnome-panel: 13 MB

for a total of 75,6 MB Ram

 

Arch values will follow soon for comparision.

[arctic]

top results on Arch (rounded values):

Xorg: 9,2 MB

Nautilus: 14 MB

init: 0,5 MB

gnome-settings: 12 MB

Metacity: 7,3 MB

wnck-applet: 10,0 MB

gnome-panel: 13 MB

 

So, a base system needs 66 MB Ram. (Take out the optional Net-applet tool in Mandy and you have only 59,6 MB Ram usage in Mandy!). But which tool was eating the memory in Arch then? A further test revealed:

Epiphany on Arch uses 28 MB Ram (Firefox uses 27 MB for comparision)

Epiphany on Mandy uses 11 MB Ram! That is a whopping difference. And Xchat also eats up another 13 MB Ram, also more than in Mandy (where it was at round about 7,8 MB if I remember correctly). Surprise, surprise...

 

Lesson learned: Kick Epihphany in Arch. ;)

[scarecrow]

I'm not a Gnome user, but various "evil" things are said about the latest Cairo releases (unstable, RAM eaters, etc...). Personally I do have a problem when I fire up VMware, which uses system gtk resources, incl. Cairo. When fired directly ( "vmware" under alt+F2, or under a console ), it takes almost TWO minutes to appear (annoying, isn't it? ), but if fired with the vmware embedded gtk ( "VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=force vmware" ) it fires up in less than ten seconds.

But this is a well known gnome issue, not an Arch one.

[tyme]

there's a definite version difference in x-chat between mandy and arch - not sure how that translates in RAM usage. i'm also curious why gnome-settings is showing up on arch, but not on mandy.

 

any luck with the sound?

 

as far as cairo...i'm running XGL w/it, and i honestly don't notice much of a slow down (it does eat more ram, obviously). IIRC, the gnome in mandy doesn't yet have cairo.

[arctic]

there's a definite version difference in x-chat between mandy and arch - not sure how that translates in RAM usage. i'm also curious why gnome-settings is showing up on arch, but not on mandy.

Of course the Mandy and Arch versions are different development snapshots, but I wonder why Xchat increased so much (there is not a lot of more functionality) and especially why Epiphany more than doubled the Ram requirement. I mean: Epiphany in Mandy and Arch are not really different. :huh:

About gnome-settings: I am also curious why Mandriva never displays it with top. :unsure:

 

any luck with the sound?

Not yet. The base system says now that everything is fine but gnome still asks for some gstreamer plugin, but gives me no detail which it wants. And there are soooo many plugins, that I am a bit disappointed by the error message I got. A bit like: I don't like your sound. Fix it, but I won't tell you how. :P And yes, onboard sound sucks. :D

 

as far as cairo...i'm running XGL w/it, and i honestly don't notice much of a slow down (it does eat more ram, obviously). IIRC, the gnome in mandy doesn't yet have cairo.

Cairo is available but not installed as default as it was considered too unstable when 2006 was released. And my Arch is fast and snappy with cairo enabled. I cannot notice any slowdown.

 

One thing I can add now: I had a direct comparision of Debian and Arch. Booting: Almost similar speed (both are at roughly 30 seconds until gdm is loaded). But then, Debians Gnome needs some five seconds to load completely while Arch does it in roughly three seconds and all apps open a lot faster on Arch than in Debian. So for a speed freak, Arch is definitely a nice option.

 

On a sidenote: I also checked the current dreamlinux live-CD (with installer option). Looks really great (perhaps the most polished XFCE ever), performs very well and is one of the fastest live-CDs I have seen so far (morphix/debian based). So if you are bored, check it out. ;)

[tyme]

i had dreamlinux on my list but haven't gotten it downloaded yet. should be interesting.

[ffi]

i had dreamlinux on my list but haven't gotten it downloaded yet. should be interesting.

 

I think that if you need to download an iso of their site it will take forever, its really slow, but it looks interesting, I have been trying XFCE in cooker but there are still quite a few bugs there, wonder if this would be any better.

 

@artic, I am still puzzled by your wish to install german :huh:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

;)

Edited July 24, 2006 by ffi

[tyme]

I think that if you need to download an iso of their site it will take forever, its really slow, but it looks interesting, I have been trying XFCE in cooker but there are still quite a few bugs there, wonder if this would be any better.

I found a torrent for it. And Dreamlinux isn't Mandriva or cooker-based (it's morphix-based, which is knoppix-based, which is debian-based), so it doesn't really matter what's in cooker. XFCE has been quite stable for some time.

@artic, I am still puzzled by your wish to install german :huh:

If that's meant to be a joke, it's not a very funny one, and it's a dead one either way.

[ffi]

I found a torrent for it. And Dreamlinux isn't Mandriva or cooker-based (it's morphix-based, which is knoppix-based, which is debian-based), so it doesn't really matter what's in cooker. XFCE has been quite stable for some time.

it has xfce 4.4 which is still beta and has only been released 2 weeks ago

[tyme]

that still doesn't mean that you'll find the same bugs in both. two different distributions, two different development teams. bugs aren't always from the program itself, they can often be distro-specific. that was my point ;)

[arctic]

@artic, I am still puzzled by your wish to install german :huh:

If that's meant to be a joke, it's not a very funny one, and it's a dead one either way.

Well, that joke put a nice smile on my face. :)

 

I have downloaded the dreamlinux iso in less than 90 minutes from the default ftp-server yesterday.

[tyme]

@artic, I am still puzzled by your wish to install german :huh:

If that's meant to be a joke, it's not a very funny one, and it's a dead one either way.

Well, that joke put a nice smile on my face. :)

:P