RAM Usage During Installation of Lubuntu

[Yorvyk]

On 16/06/13 19:22, Nio Wiklund wrote:
> On 2013-06-16 20:00, Aere Greenway wrote:
>> 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
>>
> Aere,
>
> I think your analysis is correct, so if you have low RAM
>
> 1. Make sure there is swap and that it is active before starting the
> installer
>
> 2. Do not touch it during the installation (at the partitioning
> page)
>
I experimented with having a swap partition before starting the install
a long time ago, with somewhat inconsistent results. I even tried having
one on the USB stick. I didn't research it more because the Alternate CD 
would work with 128 MiB of RAM. I did, however, succeed in booting 
Lubuntu in 32 MiB of RAM with a PII CPU. It took an absolute age and was 
quite useless once booted.



-- 


Steve