Frugal install, why is drive accessed so often?

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Frugal install, why is drive accessed so often?
started by: brentmoore

Posted by brentmoore on April 19 2006,02:57

I've noticed this with both the USB Pendrive boot and now again with my Frugal install: when I do a fresh boot and launch a program I haven't yet used (such as Firefox) I notice my drive is accessed quite a bit while that program is being opened. This suggests to me that the program is being loaded from the drive, not from RAM..... I thought the entire 50 MB image was loaded into RAM when DSL boots? Why is it accessing the drive again?

Maybe I'm totally missunderstanding the way that DSL works?

Posted by mikshaw on April 19 2006,03:21

With a default setup, only a portion of the system is loaded into RAM. This includes /home, /opt, /var, /proc, and /etc (parts of them anyway). The KNOPPIX file, which contains the base filesystem, is mounted. This means that the drive needs to be accessed in order to get at those files. If you want the KNOPPIX file to be loaded into RAM you will need to use the "toram" boot option, which takes an additional 50mb of memory (typically a vanilla DSL system uses only a few mb to start with).

Posted by brentmoore on April 19 2006,04:12

Oooooooh. Cool beans! Thanks!!