zRAM and Live CD

[Yorvyk]

As I'd just downloaded the latest daily so I could have a clean install 
for writing the Lubuntu Manual, I thought I'd have a go installing on a 
really on a low RAM machine to see if it made any difference. It appears to.

Compaq Deskpro EP K450 from last century.

Intel 440BX chip set
450 MHz Pentium III
256 MiB PC100 RAM
6.4 GB HDD (from Oct 1998)
MGA G200 AGP graphics

The HDD had a single FAT 32 partition on it. I booted from USB using 
PLOP and selected Try Lubuntu and then ran top. zRAM used 128 MiB RAM 
and already swap was in use, only 4 MiB. I then launched the installer 
from the desktop and the swap usage then started to creep up. I used the 
default settings for the install and set it going. Once the swap on the 
HHD was formated it came into use, adding an additional 360 MiB of 
space. An hour and a quarter later it finished. I was making a meal 
while it carried out the install, but kept popping through to see how it 
was going. The largest swap usage I saw was around 220 MiB and the load 
average was around 3.5-4. As the CPU heat sink uses convection cooling 
it did start to get rather warm, but not too hot to touch.

Having attempted to use a Live CD on this machine previously to install 
and failing, even with the direct install, I was quite impressed. I 
didn't realise the swap on the HHD would be mounted and used during the 
installation.



-- 


Steve