running damn small from ram

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: running damn small from ram
started by: getoverit

Posted by getoverit on April 02 2005,05:15

i got a celron that im gona use to download shit, and i want set aside liek 128 ram to put damn small to boot insanly fast, how could i do this, also how could i do a hard drive install of this? i dident burn it to a cd yet but im just curious thank!!! oh and how could u install this to run off a usb thumb drive, thanks again

Wes

Posted by mikshaw on April 02 2005,05:27

to boot it to ram type in "dsl toram" at the boot prompt. I don't know if you can "set aside" a particular amount of ram for it though

Posted by tronik on April 02 2005,05:37

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also how could i do a hard drive install of this? i dident burn it to a cd yet but im just curious thank!!! oh and how could u install this to run off a usb thumb drive, thanks again

All of these are possible, and well documented here on the forums =) and in the documentation (click 'Documentation' from the main page. Please use the forum 'search' feature to find out more information.

Search with your keywords, On all Open Forums, From the Beginning, And Newer!

Posted by RoGuE_StreaK on April 02 2005,08:35

Just wondering, if you ran DSL purely from a dedicated USB drive, how much difference between that and running with toram? Or running USB with toram...? ie., what would be the fastest possible way to run an install of DSL with current available technologies?

Posted by tronik on April 02 2005,12:30

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Is it USB 1 or USB 2?

Toram would be quicker...Your machines ram is much more efficient and queued higher priority than any other form of storage on your machine. Wouldn't it be nice if we could program our own l2cache? ;p and put DSL on it?!

The fastest possible way to run DSL is toram. It makes things quite snappy, really, and its how I do it.

And then I guess it would depend on the speed of the RAM, wouldn't it? hehe...

Hope this helps!

Posted by cbagger01 on April 02 2005,18:31

Your best solution is:

dsl in toram mode + activated linux swap partition

or

dsl in toram mode + activated DOS swap file

The toram part will increase performance dramatically and the swap will prevent your computer from crashing if you hit the RAM limit. Instead of crashing, it will just swap out some infrequently used part of memory to your disk drive.

Posted by RoGuE_StreaK on April 03 2005,04:10

Guessing that if you use a USB (2) drive to get DSL into ram with toram, and then have a swap partition on USB rather than on a harddrive, this would be the fastest at the moment? So load DSL toram from USB2, have a swap on USB2, and use a harddrive for storage of files (unless you have a huge USB drive, or course...).
Just that USB2 drives are getting pretty cheap for 128MB ones (ie. Aus$30-40), thinking about getting one as a permanent DSL-only system core....

Posted by cbagger01 on April 04 2005,03:11

NEVER install a swap file or swap partition to a flash-based memory device like a USB thumb drive.

Flash memory has a limited number of "writes" to it before it will fail and swap files/partitions will quickly wear out your flash device.

Now if you have a USB2 external hard drive, it is OK to use it for swap purposes.