Subj : Re: Slimmed down Debian To : Barry Martin From : Ky Moffet Date : Sat Sep 14 2019 20:15:00 BARRY MARTIN wrote: > Hi Ky! > KM> whenever anything used that address range, it crashed. Locked out > KM> that range, never crashed again (and that 286 routinely had > KM> uptimes in excess of two years). > > I'm impressed! :) The longest continuous run-time I've had is just > under ten months. I've been ruined... --Wedgie, 286, DOS, 2 years twice, 1 year once, in daily use. No crashes; had to do occasional low-level format on MFM hard disk. --Gremlin, P3, first WinME (2yrs) then XP (2.5 yrs 3 times, constrained by power outages beyond UPS's capacity) --Dink, P3 (3rd incarnation), Win98, 5 months (did not have rollover timer bug) --Paladin III, P4, XP, 8 months? --Bullet, quad-core, XP64, 10 mos constrained by power outage beyond the UPS's capacity; doesn't leak resources or get goofed up at all, so absent power outages, would probably run indefinitely. --Silver, quad-core, XP, 8 months; have to restart every few months because of browsers garbaging up RAM. So I think anything less than a few months is embarrassing. :D > As for the address range, yes, if the chip is bad or > the connection to the chip is faulty the effect is the same: doesn't > work. Yep, didn't really matter because not worth replacing either way. > Could create a virtual machine on your mega-toy you were gifted -- the > one with the three multi-terabyte hard drives. Unfortunately VMs don't Yeah, that's why I went ahead and maxed RAM on the i7... not like Win7 needs 32GB, but thinking I should resurrect all the old systems in VMs. > quite work the same as a real machine, or at least in my extremely > limited experience: overall a slight sluggishness. May be something to > do with me not knowing how to configure fully properly. Will always be slower than the real thing, given it's got at least one extra layer between it and the hardware... am told it really helps to give your VM'd OS plenty of RAM. > KM> Yeah. I did an actual count via some monitor util, and it was > KM> something like 105 services loaded for Ubuntu, vs 25 for Mint. > KM> Well, no wonder Mint is that much faster! > Only a quarter as many! Of course that doesn't account for how long it > takes to load, but just the three-quarters as many would still speed > things up. I hunted up the monitor util because Mint's startup and especially shutdown were noticeably faster, as in I didn't even start tapping my foot. :) > > command that may have been useful: "system-analyze blame". Lists the > > time it takes to load a boot process from longest to quickest. > KM> Oh, that's interesting... It's a systemd command, > KM> and PCLinuxOS doesn't use systemd. (I suppose you've heard the > KM> giant debate about systemd vs how-we've-always-done-it. I have no > KM> religion either way, but am annoyed by binary logs.) But most > KM> distros do use systemd, so useful to know. Then again, I might install Mageia as an alternate, and it uses systemd. > I'm sort of going the 'semi-technical hobbyist' route: I'll let the > programmers and developers creating the stuff figure out the details on > "what is best" as I certainly don't have the education. They're (the > programmers and developers) aren't always right but I don't know how to > build so going with their advisements. ..Doesn't mean I won't try > something! I can see both sides of the argument. But with all the complaints about systemd, still no one has produced a viable fork. There's a video, "The Tragedy of systemd" that's worth a look. > KM> The old WDs are pretty fast -- almost as fast as the slower SSDs. > KM> Seagates, tho.. slugs. > > It seems just about all of the refurbished systems I've purchased and > lately tearing apart have Seagate hard drives. I've been purchasing Yeah, I think what happens is Seagate and WD both try to undercut one another with the OEMs, so the OEMs play 'em against one another. The practical effect being some years you see Seagates, other years WDs. I'd rather see WDs, tho. :) > Western Digital since my XT days because of some super-good customer > service they gave me when I was upgrading. That, and that when they plan to die, they usually give plenty of notice. > As for hard drive speed vs. slow SSD, my limited experience still has > SSDs as sooo much faster: HDD would take close to two minutes while the > SSD is taking 20-30 seconds. A slightly uneven playing field: part of Yeah... but compare a laptop HD, it's a lot closer to the SSD. > the reason for the storage upgrade was to upgrade the OS, so also went > from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04, but I haven't read where Bionic Beaver is > significantly faster. (Now if 19.04 was slower maybe nickname it > 'Catatonic Cat'?!) Haha... I very much doubt it'll be faster. BTW "Present Arms" (forget what he calls his channel) is doing a memory comparison among the desktops which should be interesting. He did a partial but is re-doing it more complete. https://www.youtube.com/user/presentarms Oh, well, that was obvious. :) Just for the record, my PCLOS/KDE (which has every K-app known to man installed, and various other crap) uses 690mb at startup, or 730mb after it's been busy a while. About 100mb of that is probably the nVidia driver and similar junk; default naked install uses about 550mb. > > tests for something that isn't there, so I get an message essentially > > meaning "error loading because it's not there". A little > KM> Seen a few of those. Also something like "Error loading error". > Nothing like having a problem because there are no problems! As I was going up the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. I wish, I wish he'd stay away!! > I also had a problem with "IOMMU" - Input Output Memory Management Unit > - which to me implies it does something different but if it was set to > default (off I think - forgotten) during the OS installation (from DVD) > the USB 2.0 ports were killed. Mouse doesn't function, keyboard doesn't > function - thanks! Did accidentally find USB 3.0 was working so used Input Output... that might be a clue :D > them. LIS in an earlier thread on the build of the first computer using > an UEFI motherboard things were overly complicated by me not knowing > about UEFI, a bad RAM stick, and multiple bad installation attempts > until I found the bad RAM and learned about what switches to flip during > installation. (It's not complicated, just not simple.) That sounds like simply start over :) > As for altering SWAP size, etc., in this instance no way to alter: > overlays a boot partition, maybe a swap, a partition for the utility and > the rest is for the data. Some people are starting to run with no linux swap -- after all why do we need swap on modern systems with piles of RAM? > As for the current Ubuntu machines, this one has 32 GB of RAM and 32 GB > of Swap -- I don't recall who set the swap size, probably the > installation disk. I haven't seen this machine use more than 7 GB of So that's pretty much wasted swap space. > Same for the other system I'm using as the MythTV Backend: 'only' 16 GB > of RAM in it, think uses not quite half (5 GB?). IIRC that system > installed a 2 GB Swap. Which seems more rational. > .I'm sort of using hybrid storage here: converting over to SSD, at One of the "new" laptops has a hybrid HD -- 32GB flash RAM and 1TB spinning rust. Certainly is fast... > least for the boot drive. Any machine which is being used for a lot of > data also has hard drive -- old information where SSDs failed so a They were less than stellar for a few years (well, unless compared to a Maxtor, then SSDs looked great) tho have greatly improved, but there are still a LOT of DOAs and grey market (no warranty unless shipped to Europe) or not-precisely-new, which is why I buy SSDs at Best Buy, where I can return locally if need be. > little gun-shy. There are some machines now with just a SSD. All have Yeah, the "new" i7 boxen are eating up the surplus SSDs :) Made a big difference with Win7, which seems to have a lot of lag during disk reads compared to XP and Vista. > > KM> It has 8 3TB HDs. It had 4 480GB SSDs, which got filched to > > KM> upgrade other stuff. Did I mention how I accidentally made a USB > > KM> bootable Win7?? :) > > Not yet! > KM> Decided to swap slow Seagate for faster SSD. Hung SSD off USB > KM> port using an adapter gadget. Used Partition Wizard Free (they > KM> used to offer a bootable ISO version) to clone system to SSD. On > KM> a whim, rebooted and selected USB as boot device. And up came > KM> Win7... slowly since via USB, but it ran fine! > > Woo-hoo!! :) As long as you don't have to boot it too often that slow > boot should be acceptable. Now to see about using the SSD and a faster > communications channel! Yep! And now wondering if it would work with other OSs.. a HD on USB is not the same as a flash drive on USB, but an SSD is small and light enough to shirt-pocket, so... an alternative to VM'ing?? BTW I used Partition Wizard Free (bootable ISO they used to offer) to do the cloning, since it knows how to align SSDs. > > Waiting until get snow-bound and so no interuptions?! > KM> Hahaha then I'll be shoveling snow... probably do it in the brief > KM> respite between summer yard and garden and working on rental > KM> house (painting is finally done) and the extra work of moving > KM> snow around. > > Sounds a bit like some of the But Firsts around here! I have way too many of these But Firsts laying around... today's was Mow the Durn Lawn. > KM> If you attended their seminars, they gave you copies of Netware. > KM> I know I have 5.0 and 5.5 but don't recall if they also sent out > KM> 6.0 which IIRC was when they switched to SuSE. > > Perhaps https://download.novell.com/Download?buildid=dpIR3H1ymhk~ Huh, thanks, didn't realise that was there. 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