2.1b fluxbox takes 3 days to loadForum: X and Fluxbox Topic: 2.1b fluxbox takes 3 days to load started by: abuthemagician Posted by abuthemagician on Jan. 30 2006,16:02
I am using an old PI 166 with 16mb ram. When i used DSL 1.8 it ran awesome. Now i upgraded to 2.1b and even tried 2.2rc1 but it now takes 3 days to load Fluxbox. Any ideas? I am using the exact same settings as before:fb800x600 with the fbdev for older laptops, no usb mouse but the other one. Thanks in advance! Posted by crusadingknight on Jan. 30 2006,16:46
I have no idea what would cause that kind of slowdown with fluxbox. Unfortunately, it's hard to find what changed, since there was never a 1.8 release - the versions went from 1.5 to 2.0.
Posted by abuthemagician on Jan. 30 2006,17:06
maybe it was 1.1 or 0.8 then. Can't remember for sure, I did a HD install of the older version
Posted by abuthemagician on Jan. 30 2006,17:12
it was 1.5, just found the ISO on my windows box
Posted by mikshaw on Jan. 30 2006,18:50
Hyperbole really doesn't help when trying to find a solution...when you say "3 days" i assume you mean "several seconds", or "a minute or longer"?You say you had a harddrive install before. Was it traditonal debian style? How are you using the newer version? My guess is the problem comes from the 16mb. When using a traditional harddrive install, you are using much less ram because the whole system runs from the harddrive. With a liveCD or frugal, part of the system is loaded into RAM, and then when you load up applications (particularly gui apps), you use even more ram. Anything which would be written to disk (temp files, personal configs, etc) is instead loaded into RAM. 16mb can get filled very quickly. Posted by abuthemagician on Jan. 30 2006,19:06
ok, when i had 1.5 installed, I started out using the Live CD, and since it ran so well, i went to a Hard drive install. I did this from inside DSL, first creating a partition using cfdisk (i think thats what its called) then running the hard drive install tool (not the frugal install). This ran great for a while. Then I saw last friday (1/30/2006) 2.1b was out so i made a list of the extras i had installed and grabbed the iso. When I tried running the live cd, everything was great until the black and white background came up with the X cursor. Then it began to crawl and I waited at least 1 hour to see if the desktop icons would show up. Nothing did. I know it was an hour because thats how long my lunch is. Then i thought it must not have enough ram so I gave the install command at boot, and installed 2.1b to the hard drive. It installed ok. I booted the laptop at maybe 2:30pm. When i left work it was 5:15pm and it still didn't have the whole desktop. When i checked it around 9am this morning (note that it had been on since friday with no power saving features turned on) it still hadn't done anything more than the stats screen in the upper left and the bar at the bottom. I have also tried running the lowram command but that does nothing.
Posted by doobit on Jan. 30 2006,21:28
You really need a swap partition when you only have 16MB of RAM. You should also boot the live CD in text only, or a minimal X to minimize the amount of RAM that gets used up before you install.
Posted by plinej on Jan. 30 2006,22:17
I'll throw in the fact that 2.1b is also a different kernel than the 1.5 release which may not run the same on your computer. You may want to try the new 2.2 release candidate instead since it went back to the old kernel.
Posted by abuthemagician on Jan. 31 2006,12:56
tried the 2.2rc1, but it did the same thing... how do i get a swap partition in there? Obviously i need to make one when i partition the drive, but it's not like the install asks where it is...
Posted by plinej on Jan. 31 2006,13:46
create your swap partition with cfdisk.Let's say it's at hda5 (yours may be different) open up aterm and type the following: mkswap -c /dev/hda5 swapon /dev/hda5 Posted by abuthemagician on Jan. 31 2006,13:50
Thanks i'll give that a try with 2.2rc1
Posted by abuthemagician on Jan. 31 2006,17:21
figured out the issue... ram was not properly seated... thanks for all the help!
Posted by doobit on Jan. 31 2006,17:22
Make your swap partition about 256MB. Normally you want it to be double the size of your RAM, but you don't have much RAM. 256MB is a little bigger than DSL when it's fully unpacked, so that gives some working space.
Posted by abuthemagician on Jan. 31 2006,20:30
do i need this even for a HD install?
Posted by doobit on Jan. 31 2006,20:39
You don't necessarily need it to make DSL work from what I've seen, however, it does make things work more smoothly by acting like a bit of extra memory for those larger programs to use. Some of the GTK2 stuff, for example, won't even run on my computer with 64MB of RAM without the swap file. I guess it depends on how you are going to use DSL.
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