• Re: Advice for newbie

    From Gordon@Gordon@leaf.net.nz to alt.os.linux on Wed Mar 4 23:48:34 2026
    From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

    On 2026-02-09, Graham J <nobody@nowhere.co.uk> wrote:
    Carlos E. R. wrote:

    [snip]

    The installers have a minimum memory requirement to run, to; it should
    be somewhere in the documentation. And the messages they give can be
    misleading.


    Found another 1GB RAM, so the machine now has 2GB. It boots the Mint
    DVD, takes several minutes to start, and looks useful.

    Well Mint says it needs.


    2GB RAM (4GB recommended for a comfortable usage).
    20GB of disk space (100GB recommended).
    1024×768 resolution (on lower resolutions, press ALT to drag windows with the mouse if they don’t fit in the screen).

    I would look for another 2GB of ram. Working with 2 GB RAM is going to wear
    you down.





    So the next step is to try the installer.



    --- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2
  • From Kerr-Mudd, John@admin@127.0.0.1 to alt.os.linux on Thu Mar 5 09:07:17 2026
    From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

    On 4 Mar 2026 23:48:34 GMT
    Gordon <Gordon@leaf.net.nz> wrote:

    On 2026-02-09, Graham J <nobody@nowhere.co.uk> wrote:
    Carlos E. R. wrote:

    [snip]

    The installers have a minimum memory requirement to run, to; it should
    be somewhere in the documentation. And the messages they give can be
    misleading.


    Found another 1GB RAM, so the machine now has 2GB. It boots the Mint
    DVD, takes several minutes to start, and looks useful.

    Well Mint says it needs.


    2GB RAM (4GB recommended for a comfortable usage).
    20GB of disk space (100GB recommended).
    1024×768 resolution (on lower resolutions, press ALT to drag windows with the mouse if they don’t fit in the screen).

    I would look for another 2GB of ram. Working with 2 GB RAM is going to wear you down.


    I'd suggest trying an older or less resource intense linux - Puppy or
    Tinycore, though these use mounted "backup" images - different to
    mainstream linux implementations.
    I have a 20year-old laptop, boots Tinycore happily in 1G. disk images are
    of the order 10's of megs, not gigs.



    So the next step is to try the installer.



    --
    Bah, and indeed Humbug.
    --- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2
  • From Paul@nospam@needed.invalid to alt.os.linux on Thu Mar 5 14:38:17 2026
    From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

    On Thu, 3/5/2026 4:07 AM, Kerr-Mudd, John wrote:
    On 4 Mar 2026 23:48:34 GMT
    Gordon <Gordon@leaf.net.nz> wrote:

    On 2026-02-09, Graham J <nobody@nowhere.co.uk> wrote:
    Carlos E. R. wrote:

    [snip]

    The installers have a minimum memory requirement to run, to; it should >>>> be somewhere in the documentation. And the messages they give can be
    misleading.


    Found another 1GB RAM, so the machine now has 2GB. It boots the Mint
    DVD, takes several minutes to start, and looks useful.

    Well Mint says it needs.


    2GB RAM (4GB recommended for a comfortable usage).
    20GB of disk space (100GB recommended).
    1024×768 resolution (on lower resolutions, press ALT to drag windows with the mouse if they don’t fit in the screen).

    I would look for another 2GB of ram. Working with 2 GB RAM is going to wear >> you down.


    I'd suggest trying an older or less resource intense linux - Puppy or Tinycore, though these use mounted "backup" images - different to
    mainstream linux implementations.
    I have a 20year-old laptop, boots Tinycore happily in 1G. disk images are
    of the order 10's of megs, not gigs.

    It all depends on what you expect to do with it, too.
    Applications can be quite demanding.

    And while there are things like this, as an ointment for your swap:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram # compressed swap

    there are limits as to how far a concept like that can be pushed.
    The advantage to swap mounted on RAM, is such things can be
    buttery smooth. All it needs... is CPU cores you don't have :-)
    And the reason we would want to do that, is to avoid wear and
    tear if using a swap on top of an SSD. A swap on top of a HDD
    certainly works, but the seek time kills the deal.

    If we could buy items similar to the Gigabyte iRAM, we could
    also mount our swap on that. Such an application does not
    need the battery backed storage option on it, as the swap
    only has to remain sane for as long as the PC is running.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM

    It's because of patents, we cannot have nice things like that.
    Such hardware allows a person to "use RAM sitting around the house"
    as a means of making a swap. And because the access time is zero,
    it's pretty smooth. (That one does not have a lot of bandwidth.)

    And the FPGA makers don't necessarily help us, by potting in
    I/O options to make it easier to connect DIMMs. The one FPGA
    I have in the house here (a kit), it does come with its
    very own *single* RAM chip. A big deal :-) Wow. I won't be
    doing a lot of swapping on that.

    Now that we have AI to fart around with, you can get
    an AI to write code for your FPGA kit. Think of the time
    that will save. And seeing as we have nothing to do any more,
    that's not a bad idea.

    *******

    There are some people making things like this. It's possible
    this was advertised some time ago, at $10,000 per unit. Now,
    look at the specs at their selling-point of $2,000.

    https://www.ddrdrive.com/x1_product_brief.pdf

    Paul
    --- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2