User Feedback :: Swap problem in dsl-2.0

Quote (WDef @ Dec. 15 2005,18:31)

This caters for low ram users, who are a significant segment (but not all) of dsl users, and by all accounts this is very helpful indeed to them, so they need to be able to at very least switch it on.

The question I'm raising is: I'm not convinced this behavior should be on by default when, as time goes by, more users are bound to have adequate amounts of ram, and therefore not need this hack, which does seem to exact a performance penalty in the case I described?

::Starting kind of tangential response::

I know this sounds like a strange question, but if a person has a reasonably well "endowed" machine, why would the average person choose DSL over one of the "flashier" Linux distrobutions (including Knoppix)? (Especially over those distrobutions with budget allocations for marketing...)

As an observation (and I will state up front that I have not been observing all that long!) there seems to be quite a few of DSL's users who are either fairly comfortable in Linux, or newbies with older -or just old- machines. In the former case, they are likely to be able to understand to use boot-time switches, and in the latter case, it's going to matter if their machine crashes because it's not well spec'ed and not using all the available resources. They (the people falling into the latter group) might not perceive it as a machine problem (ie a lack of hardware resources) if Win 95/98 ran "just fine" and DSL is supposed to be able to run on a machine with similar specifications to theirs.

As time goes by, it is also possible that there may be more people falling into the "inheritance group" - people who can't afford to buy a new machine and have to rely on what's been donated to them, or even those who have older hardware and can't justify an upgrade to support a new OS (I'm actually thinking of the pre-release suggested specifications for certain propriety OSs here..) and so are considering a switch to something less resource intensive. Of course there are other reasons, and I've just taken those as examples.

I haven't encountered your problem myself WDef, but you asked why the behaviour should be left on by default?
In response I ask if you were able to get your machine to run well enough that you could hook up to the Internet and come here and ask for a solution to your problem? I'm going to assume that you were. What happens if you were not able to get the system up and running well enough to come and ask for help? As someone new to DSL (and Linux too), I would not have known the commands to produce what you gave as supporting information in the search for a solution in your first post.

I realise some people might take my response the wrong way and that it's quite a bit off the original topic. But I've posted because the question was raised by the original poster and largely because I'm curious about the replies (no flames please ;o) ).

I guess what I was wondering was why an option that enables versatility and usefulness across a large range of machines should be switched off by default for the sake of performance on a percentage (even if it is on a growing number of machines)? I mean the question with sincerity and respect, and hope you won't mind answering so I (and others) can learn :o)

Cheers and beers,
Sarah

Potential data loss hazard

John and Robert,

I recently acquired DSL 2.0 and am quite happy with it. However, I wanted to alert you to a potential hazard that you may or may not be aware of.

When booting, I noticed that DSL found three swap partitions on my hard drive. This was of some concern to me since I only had two swap partitions.

The other partition that DSL thought was "swap" actually had Red Hat 7.1 installed on it, "had" being the correct tense. Before I booted DSL it had it, now it doesn't. Luckily, this is a machine that I use for testing stuff anyway, so in my case nothing was lost that a reinstall won't take care of. But since other folks may not be so lucky, you will probably want to look into this problem.

Apparently I must have previously used that partition as a swap partition, and the Red Hat installation didn't overwrite the "SWAP-SPACE" signature.

Knoppix 4.0.2 did not mistake this partition for a swap partition.

What's happening in DSL is that /etc/fstab is being generated incorrectly. This is because /usr/sbin/rebuildfstab uses /usr/sbin/scanpartitions to identify the partitions, which, in turn, depends upon /usr/bin/file to identify them correctly. In this case it does not (because it sees the old "SWAP-SPACE" signature).

(Naturally, I will manually remove the "SWAP-SPACE" signature before using this partition again, which will solve my problem. But I assume you will want to take steps to prevent this from happening to anyone else.)

I see that Knoppix 4.0.2 has a newer version of scanpartitions, which calls a new utility: /usr/sbin/fstype. When /usr/bin/file says that a partition is a swap partition, that is taken as a suggestion, not a fact, and fdisk is called for a second opinion, which it gives after looking at the actual partition table. Needless to say, this is a much safer way than depending solely upon the "magic" of /usr/bin/file to get it right.

I hope this information is helpful. And thanks for providing the world with DSL -- mostly I like it!

Sincerely,
Norm Pierce

original here.