X and Fluxbox :: DSL boots into runlevel 2, problem with ramdisk?

Quote (gigi1234 @ Aug. 24 2006,21:29)

yeah trouble is, I have to use fromhd and can't use lowram too it has 16 MB but I am trying to upgrade to 40 MB. I think X needs 32 to run.

Hi there.

Foreword: I've used Firefox on DSL with 32MB of memory, and it runs "okay" if we don't count the minutes of start-up time, but replacing KDrive with a well configured XFree is a must. So you're on the right track with RAM upgrade.

I think I have observed the same 'ramdisk' problem with my P1/16MB config (using Smart Boot Manager), I'll illustrate a basic workaround that I applied at CD boot-time.

Code Sample

/grub\ dsl 2 # make real dirs rm /tmp mkdir /tmp rm /opt mkdir /opt # login home su dsl cd /home/dsl export HOME=/home/dsl startx #or dslinstall #or whatever

X is hitting swap bad over here with the default settings, but is comfortable after disabling all the eye-candy: opt for the minimal theme, edit .xinitrc (and .desktop) to inhibit xtdesk.sh, fluxter, docked.lua, torsmo, and dillo's automatic startup. You might also see a memory advantage of cutting syslogd from /opt/bootlocal.sh, reducing the number of tty's in /etc/inittab or even tweaking the login shell and startx scripts to use ash. Most included applications perform fair after having done all said. Another advice is to do an uncompressed install, and use a swap partition that resides between your boot and data partition.
One thing I'm still working on, is that the system still operates as slow as if only half of the memory was available, because the caches take no less than 7-9MB... Some tweaking in /proc might help, I hope no kernel recompilation is necessarry.

(An informative note: the X in a full muLinux 14R0 install running on libc5 + kernel 2.0.xx "flies" on a 8-16MB 486. )

Regards,
bkil