Re: Which linux??

On Sat, 22 Dec 2007 02:23:15 +0000, Martin Gregorie wrote:

On the other hand I'm typing in an IBM Thinkpad 560Z with 300 MHz, 192
MB RAM and a 6 GB hard drive. Its running an old distro (Fedora Core 1),
largely for installation reasons - any Fedora distro since FC1 can't be
booted off floppy and this thing can only boot from floppy or HDD (its

There's an easy way round that! I did it loads of times in the bad old
days...

Take the hard drive out of the laptop and install it in a desktop machine
(using an IDE adaptor), or another laptop which can boot from CD.
Depending on what processor is in the installation machine, you may need
to manually install the right kernel afterwards (before you put the HDD
back in the laptop) - because, if the installation machine is, say, a
Core 2 Duo and the laptop's a P2, it probably won't boot. But that should
be relatively easy. Ideally install on a machine with the same class of
processor to make life easier.

Apart from that, Linux is quite happy running on any machine - not just
the one it was intalled on. You can't do that with windows! ;-)

On the other hand I'm typing in an IBM Thinkpad 560Z with 300 MHz, 192
MB RAM and a 6 GB hard drive. Its running an old distro (Fedora Core 1),
largely for installation reasons - any Fedora distro since FC1 can't be
booted off floppy and this thing can only boot from floppy or HDD (its
CD connects via a PCMCIA card). This runs stably - I use it for all you
want to do plus a bit of C and Java development and work processing with
OpenOffice, but its can get slow. In particular:

- switching focus between Opera and Thunderbird takes forever because
192 MB isn't quite enough RAM

- for some reason I haven't fathomed it periodically gets slower,
probably because RAM and swap space get fragmented, and it needs a
reboot every 4-5 days to sort this out.

That's unlikely to be the problem (well, in 12 years of running Linux on
laptops - some fairly old - and keeping in touch with what's going on in
the Linux world, i've never heard of either of those problems.)

Almost certainly what it will be is some application has a memory leak
(which would have been fixed in a later version). You can find out what's
causing it by executing the following command in a terminal, when it's
noticeably affecting the system - maybe just before you'd normally shut
it down.

ps -e -o args,pid,ppid,%mem

That will show you the memory consumption for every process running on
the system at the time. The first column is command that started the
process, the second column is the PID or process ID, the third column is
the PPID (parent PID), and the fourth column is the percentage of system
memory it's using. So you can scroll down the list and look for the one
that's using loads of memory. You should be able to get 'ps' to sort the
list so highest memory consumption is at the top, but i don't seem to be
able to make it work (you can check out the ps man page if you want to
try!)

It's possible that you won't recognise the process that's hogging the
memory, but you may recognise its parent process. You can work that out
by looking at the PID and the PPID and then finding the process whose PID
is the same as the other one's PPID (e.g., it may be a separate process
that the web browser's running - which has a different name)

If you don't know what the process is, you can google it or ask here.

Of course, knowing what's causing the problem may not help you fix it -
because your the version of Linux you're running is very old and getting
new software to work on an old distribution can be very hard or
impossible (due to different library versions). But it's a start.
.

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