O/T: Ubuntu questions.

The other day I was somewhat surprised to find a PC with about 40 GB of page file. I doubt anyone would have anticipated that high a usage - so in that particular case, allowing it to grow might have prevented the system falling over. (Though whether that would have been just once, or repeatedly, is difficult to guess.) However, given the scale of hard disc drives, even allowing 100 GB dedicated wouldn't have much impact on most modern machines not using SSDs. (Also questions your suggestion that the default OEM install would end up adjusting the page file size downwards. This was a default OEM install. Page file still vaster than needed.)

I have many times set up a partition exclusively for paging (in Windows). From memory, if you have two page files, traffic goes to the one with most space left. So a small C: drive page file just to get going and a large paging partition ends up using the partition for most swaps.

Reply to
polygonum
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Some plonker has decreed that the task bar here is on top,. and there is an autohiding menu bar down the right hand side.

Oh that was me. For some reaoson Linux MATE allows me to make that choice...

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

What? Not square...

Reply to
Tim Watts

Can you not alter the desktop settings and drag it to where you want it?

Reply to
Tim Watts

Yes, you can - albeit with the installation of a couple of additional packages from the repo. A quick google finds all.

Reply to
Adrian

Daft, isn't it? Luckily for me I quite like the vertical menu bar on the left, but it should be moveable out of the box for others that want something else.

Reply to
David Paste

That's interesting. I did admit to not being *entirely* sure whether or not this would still be the case (automatic swap partition creation). I must try a test install using the default partitioning option some time just to see what happens. :-)

Ghod knows, I got enough practice manually partitioning the disk drive on each "practice run". :-(

Reply to
Johnny B Good

Thinking about it, this is more a function of the installer, and Mint is not the standard Ubuntu installer.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

For a desktop PC, it does seem to be an example of "overkill". I didn't imply the 'downward adjustment', the min/max option suggested *that*. :-)

I've seen several claims that NT versions of windows will make intelligent use of multiple pagefiles but have never seen a convincing description of how it 'intelligently' decides which one is the best one to hit at any one time.

What makes me question the 'intelligence' is the fact that you could have a pagefile on each of a disk volume space created on a single physical disk drive (primary partition spaces and logical disk volumes in an extended partition) which, of course, doesn't address the head contention issue that only a one (pagefile) per physical disk arrangement can alleviate.

When I was running win2k, I created an 8GB primary partition on the first 1TB HDD just for the OS, using the next 20GB for application software installs and the rest for the "My Documents" folder (MSFT's version of /home) and other large data storage, including a few GB sized games software packages to save burning up space on the "D Drive" designated for the secondary "Program Files" folder.

The second 1TB (upgraded to 2TB a year or so later) was partitioned as an extended partition with a logical 8GB FAT32 (forced to 4KB allocation units size) to hold a 4095MB fixed size pagefile at the beginning of the partition space (highest performance portion of the disk space) and another two logical disk volumes for yet more data storage and working folders that were best kept on seperate physical disk drives for the sake of best performance when working with video processing software.

If I'd thought that multiple pagefiles were processed as you've described, I'd have created a modest 512MB swap on drive C (I always turn system dumps off completely anyway) since it could have simplified things somewhat when doing more radical disk volume restoration tasks. If I ever dabble again with a win2k/XP install on real hardware, I'll keep that in mind.

Reply to
Johnny B Good

A laudable desire imo but I can't imagine he'd have been too impressed with the reality.

I chose Linux Mint KDE because I read that it approximated the win2k desktop (or could be configured to do so). I'm afraid to say it has absolutely no resemblance to the classic win2k desktop nor its 'feel' and I haven't been able to track down a 'Howto' in regard of achieving this happy state of affairs. :-(

The best I can say is that it's "usable" if you're prepared to put up with the rather clumsy UI that seems to owe more to Vista / win7 UIs than it does to the much cleaner and efficient classic desktops of win95 and win2k.

Despite the many (inexcusable imo) shortcomings with most *nix distro DEs, I put up with them since the MSFT alternative is totally unthinkable. I think Charleton Heston's character expresses almost the same sentiment in the final beach scene of "Planet of The Apes" as mine when I look at all the nonsense going on with windows 10 today (and the backporting of the same rubbish into win7).

I often used to see this quotation used in at least one regular usenet poster's sig file:

"One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them, One OS to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them"[1]

This hearkened back to winXP which seemed to be a spot on observation[2] of MSFT's strategy for World Domination. Today, with the advent of Vista / win7 / win8 / win8.1 and finally, win 10, such a comparison seems barely adequate to describe the truth of the matter.

[1] Based on the "Ring Verse" from "The Lord of The Rings" which, in its original form, goes like this:

"One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them"

[2] XP was, and still is imho, a Festering Pile of Shite. Win2k was the last of the user orientated OSes. WinXP was merely the first tentative step into the rapid descent into Consumerisation Hell we now call windows 10.
Reply to
Johnny B Good

To be as clear as I can, I am pretty darned sure that Windows (at least of that generation) takes no notice of where on the disc, speed of the device/controller, etc. Just space. And, on the basis that it finds a page file on C:, it uses that until it finds the big page file on (say) D:. After that, NEW use of page file will go to D: until the "free space" drops to the the same or below that of C: - but the rate of access thereafter may not be easily predictable.

Reply to
polygonum

You have a square monitor?

The bottom edge is 1080 pixels. The side edge is 1600. It's mounted portrait fashion - a better match for a standard piece of paper.

Andy

Reply to
Vir Campestris

Andy

Reply to
Vir Campestris

Your wording made it read as if the LH edge has a different size to the RH edge - not that RH/LH are different to Top/Bottom.

Reply to
polygonum

This is what annoys me with opensource desktops - these are basic solved problems.

And every time a new desktop comes out, it is missing half the core basic configurations.

Reply to
Tim Watts

The chromebook (an Acer c720) - not entirely straightforward to replace the OS but there are good instructions online, and isos prepared specifically for the task. It isn't a uefi problem but it's a bios written only for booting chromeOS and requires a work-around.

Since ChromeOS is linux based all the hardware works. There is no need to open the back unless you want to put a larger ssd in. totally optional.

The screen seems good as long as it is facing you directly, not at an angle.

My previous expeditions into linux use foundered on the lack of linux software, not on the os or desktop. I don't work with CAD files any more or sketchup and never cared for MSOffice, plus opensource software gets better and better so I may be happy. Then again who knows when I find I have to do something just a bit clever like extract vector graphics from a pdf or something I might be trying to get wine working.

Good luck!

Tim W

Reply to
Tim W

Ok Rod, my bad for reading more into your description than was there. Thanks for clarifying that. I rather thought it was more a case of aggregating multiple pagefiles to increase the size of the virtual memory pool (especially useful if you're using FAT32 disk volumes with a 4096MB minus one byte limit for whatever reason - my choice of FAT32 in this case being the slightly lower cpu overhead compared to NTFS and 4095MB being more than ample for my 3GB of installed RAM).

I figured that I'd be better off using a single pagefile located on the outer tracks of the 2nd HDD to minimise contention with the 1st HDD where the OS and the majority of my apps resided.

I know it's bad news, performancewise, when *any* OS is forced to hit the pagefile to run resource hungry apps but it's better than suffering, at its best, "insufficient resources" pop up messages from an app that needs more space than the ram alone can provide, or worse still, an inexplicable lockup if not an outright crash[1].

The pagefile provides a form of safety net as well as a means for the OS to deal with any outrageous pre-emptive memory allocation demands by badly written apps. Whilst on the face of it, it would seem better to install more ram to save creating a pagefile, this isn't necessarily as good an idea as it seems. The pagefile can help improve performance by shoving low priority demands into the pagefile, freeing up ram for more productive purposes. The benefit of optimising the pagefile for best paging performance is to reduce the impact of pagefile thrashing from extremely glacial to merely glacial. :-)

[1] NT versions of windows handle 'dynamic' pagefile operations much more gracefully than the DOS based windows OSes ever did. A classic symptom of dynamic pagefile and low disk space in win98 setups was a crashed and corrupted system that often needed a repair install after running scandisk to fix the FS errors.

This was the main reason why I'd reconfigure the pagefile to a fixed size to prevent the rug from being pulled out from under an app that thought it could rely on the free disk space figure remaining true between checking and committing its trust that by the time it had something to send to the disk, the free space would still be available.

It seemed a case of "The left hand not knowing what the right hand was up to." Setting the pagefile (swapfile in this case) to a fixed size eliminated such fatal crashes once the consumer had managed to let his disk get clogged up yet again with years old temporary files on a disk large enough to support a File System that could land up storing all those sub 1KB sized files in 32KB chunks of disk space as a result of the classic "All your eggs in one giant basket" single huge partition space so favoured by OEMs from the days of FAT16 through FAT32 and well into the NTFS era with HDD capacities exceeding 500GB.

I don't have a very high regard for the competence of OEMs in creating a reasonably optimised pre-installed windows OS. The classic example of such cunning stuntery being exemplified by Toshiba some 16 or 17 years ago when my brother brought his recently purchased laptop to show off to me.

It had come with windows 98 installed on its 2GB HDD which had been formatted using FAT16 (2047MB drive C using 32KB clusters) rather than the, by then, standard FAT32 FS. The 16MB drive D that I'd initially assumed to be a RAMDisk turned out to be the leftover disk space!

I could hardly believe my eyes when I realised what the cunning stunts at Toshiba had done. If they'd split the disk 49/49 and ignored the left over 16 or 17MB using FAT16, their customer (my brother) would likely have been better off by an effective 300MB or more of usable disk space (C and D disk volumes both set to 1023MB). However, since it was a win98 pre-installed OS, the use of FAT16 over the supported FAT32 FS was totally inexcusable (and, quite frankly, totally inexplicable[2]).

With the laptop being a brand new machine, I merely voiced my 'concerns' since I didn't want to 'dick around' with a machine still under the OEM's warranty (and I think my brother had a similar 'warranty concern'). I don't recall 'converting the FS' and I can't recall whether my brother pursued this option on his own either, even though win98 included a fat16 to fat32 converter utility which would have facilitated this action.

[2] Possibly Toshiba had an excess of 2GB laptop drive inventory left over from earlier stock intended for win95 specced models, predating the OSR2 release, which had been pre-formatted using FAT16 to cater for win95's lack of FAT32 support at that stage. Just a wild guess, otherwise I can't make any sense of Toshiba's choice of FS in this instance.
Reply to
Johnny B Good

They are on Mate or cinnamon, yes. So don't use UNITY that's all.

so stick to an older one.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

I don't believe anyone, including yourself, thought for one instant that he was referring to anything other than a widescreen monitor rotated into a portrait orientation. Chris just attempting to inject a bit of levity into this thread. :-)

In all of the history of electronic display devices, including the round faced CRT tubes[1] masked off to an initial experimental 5:4 aspect ratio (only to be resurrected some 7 decades later with LCD screens) then a 4:3 aspect ratio which became the de-facto standard in the earliest of 405 line "High Definition" TV sets surviving the transition to 625 line "Even Higher Definition" TV sets through into the late 80s / early 90s before the advent of digital terrestrial broadcast services arrived in the late

90s to usurp the 70 year old 4:3 de-facto aspect ratio, shared by both TV sets and computer monitors alike, with a plethora of 'widescreen' formats, there have never been any display devices using other than a rectangular display area.

Having laid out those historic reasons as to why *nobody* would have any reason whatsoever to think that Andy's description of long and short sides of a display device could be interpreted any other way than he had intended, he didn't need to elaborate any further since his own and everyone else?s collective experience that computer displays are only ever rectangular implied the *one and only* reason for the left hand side being used for the task bar proving to be a waste of usable area was that the display had been rotated into portrait mode.

HTH & HAND :-)

[1] The original round faced CRTs were specified by the diameter of the tube face. Naturally, when masked off to create a rectangular 4:3 aspect ratio display area, the diameter became the diagonal measurement which, for a standard aspect ratio picture tube, conveniently became the single metric required to reliably describe the size of any TV set's picture tube.

It's only with the advent of widescreen aspect ratios (and there are a few different ones still around) that the utility of such a single 'diagonal metric' has become compromised as a reliable 'figure of merit'.

Reply to
Johnny B Good

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