RAM Usage During Installation of Lubuntu

[Aere Greenway]

On 06/10/2013 02:25 AM, Nio Wiklund wrote:
> I think the difference is*already installed swap*
>
> and it is probably not told to the newbies clearly enough, how important
> it is when the RAM is low.
>
> If you start with a computer without linux, there will be no swap, and
> if the RAM is below 1 GB (or maybe below 768MB), you should start
> editing the partitions with for example gparted, and at least create
> swap. I think it is too late at the partitioning page of the installer
> (if the you reach that page at all).
>
Nio, and all:

The comment about "already-installed swap" may be of particular 
significance in my case.

When I install from a live CD/DVD, I (almost?) always do manual 
partitioning (the "Something Else" choice).

 From not knowing otherwise, and also a bit of "programmers' 
superstition", even though there was a pre-existing swap partition on 
the disk, I would always click on the existing swap partition, and click 
the "Change" button.

In the dialog that came up, there was nothing there that actually needed 
to be changed, so I would just click on the OK button, hoping that the 
installer now knew about the swap partition.

 From what I have read in this e-mail stream, what I have been doing may 
have had the opposite effect from what I intended.

It may be that if I had left the swap partition alone, the installer 
would have found it, and all would have been well.  But where I selected 
the swap partition, and clicked "Change", it now became a newly-created 
swap partition, and was possibly not available to the installer.

By the way, I yesterday installed Xubuntu 13.04 on my 450 megahertz 
machine with 512 meg of RAM.  In that install, I did not click on the 
pre-existing swap partition, instead, letting the installer find it.

I had put a system-resource monitor in the task bar (which includes the 
amount of swap space), and throughout the installation (I used the "Try 
Xubuntu" button), I monitored the swap space used.

 From the very beginning, it showed there was swap space available (in 
the expected amount), and during the install, it used some of that space 
(a maximum of 63 megabytes, as I recall).

In this install, to test this, I did not remove the Ubiquity slide-show 
package.

The installation went successfully to completion, and did not crash.

Unfortunately, I cannot conclusively say that leaving the pre-existing 
swap partition alone in the manual-partitioning was the difference that 
made it work, because I did the installation from a USB stick with a 
persistance area on the USB.  I had to do that because Xubuntu won't fit 
on a CD, and a CD-drive is all that machine has.

What I am sure of, is that it used that pre-existing swap partition 
throughout the installation.

Again, the installation above was of Xubuntu (not Lubuntu).  But the 
problem where I have to remove the Ubiquity slide-show for the 
installation to succeed on systems having only 512 megabytes of RAM, has 
happened to me (in the past) on Lubuntu, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, and UbuntuStudio.

-- 
Sincerely,
Aere

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