User Feedback :: Random crashes - require power off & reboot



Quote (roberts @ Aug. 29 2007,10:58)
I would try without 'toram'.
Running without swap on 192MB means as soon as your free memory is consumed you will freeze/crash.
You almost need to be monitoring your free memory available.
Without a swap, perhaps you should consider some of the lowram boot options available with DSL.
See F2 and F3 at the initial boot prompt.

I'm running toram and without swap since I've installed DSL on a compact flash card. I was under the impression that I needed to do this to minimize writes to the CF card. What would happen if I didn't run toram?

I chose the CF card for silent running, and I chose DSL so I could run a modern OS & apps on older hardware (hence I don't want to go minimal). I guess I'll just have to decide which feature is more important to me.. If I keep getting problems with crashes, I may end up getting a hard drive so I can use swap.

OR, I suppose my CF-IDE adapter has two slots. I could buy a cheap CF card and "sacrifice" it as swap space?
It is writes that will cause failures on CF not reads.
You have unlimited read capabilities on CF/Pendrive devices.
You have a limited number of writes.

So going without toram is not an issue.
Even using DSL's backup restore onto a CF/Pendrive partition is much easier on these devices than installing and running traditionally on such device. We are in a sense using the device as a huge floppy drive.

Running DSL without toram is still like running from the read-only CDROM. In fact, you can eliminate the frugal boot option to force a true read-only parttion and use a second parition for backups, or a secondary removable device for backups, e.g., another CF, a pendrive, a usb mini-hardrive, or even the web.

Selecting jwm is lighter than using fluxbox, not running torsmo is lighter too. Not staring dillo is lighter, not constantly running wmswallow/dmix & mount.app but instead selecting from menu or make an icon for them using icontool. Not displaying a background image. These are all things you can do to maximize use of low memory systems.

DSL does not force decisions on the user, we are more of a construction kit and allow much freedom in how you setup your machine.

However, 192 MB running to toram, no swap, and expecting JAVA/Firefox to run is pushing the limits.
A possible alternative: did you try the small swap-in-ramdisk technique?

Quote
I could buy a cheap CF card and "sacrifice" it as swap space?
You could try... but probably best as a "last" resort.  I have heard vista uses some technology with flash devices to temporarily speed up things, but I haven't tried it myself.
> did you try the small swap-in-ramdisk technique?

No - I haven't even heard of that. Sounds interesting, but a little counter-intuitive. I mean, if part of ram is set aside as a swap disk, then it won't be available for other stuff?

Anyway, I found a 2GB microdrive on sale for $15 (yes, really!) so I'll set that up as swap. Until then, I'm trying to be a little more disciplined about not leaving too many programs running at once.

I'm hoping that swap will be used relatively rarely, so I should still mostly get the silent running benefits of booting from CF.
The microdrive hasn't arrived yet, so in the meantime I've implemented most of your suggestions:

* booting without the toram option - no noticable performance penalty
*]using the supplied Firefox 1.0 instead of the 2.0 .dsl - I can do pretty much all I need to using this
* changed wm from Fluxbox to JWM. I wish JWM was themable, but I guess I can live with its looks. I'm getting used to it

The reason I originally went to 2.0 was that I thought I needed it to run AdBlock Pro - without which I just can't stand to use some of my preferred sites. Then I found that AdBlock is still available and also compatible with Firefox 1.0 - so I can browse without all the annoying ads. I haven't run into any sites I use that don't work with 1.0, so I think I'm in the clear.

Since making these changes I've
Next Page...
original here.