Ubiquity installer not usable on machines with <= 256 MB of RAM

[Daniel Robitaille]

On 5/9/06, Daniel Robitaille <robitaille at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/9/06, Krzysztof Lichota <krzysiek at lichota.net> wrote:
> > Matt Zimmerman napisał(a):
> > >> I will try to test Ubuntu version tomorrow, along with Flight 7 of
> > >> Kubuntu to see if the problem is still there.
> > >
> > > I would not expect the results to be different.
> >
> > With Ubuntu (flight 7), on my laptop (240 MB of real memory) it is even
> > worse than with Kubuntu :(
> > I cannot even turn off swap (swapoff -a) without freezing the system or
> > killing swapoff process due to out-of-memory.
> >
> > Can someone else verify this (with real setup, not in virtual environment)?
>
> I don't see that.  With my laptop (Ubuntu Flight 7 + daily updates),
> with 256mb of ram, I turned off swap, and the system is still usable,
> but a little bit slower.  That's with Firefox running and your default
> set of applets installed in the panel.   Here is the output of the
> free command before and after turning off the swap:
>
> daniel at laptop:~$ free
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:        248196     242320       5876          0       1528      50936
> -/+ buffers/cache:     189856      58340
> Swap:       730916      33972     696944
> daniel at laptop:~$ sudo swapoff -a
> Password:
> daniel at laptop:~$ free
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:        248196     244544       3652          0        136      43460
> -/+ buffers/cache:     200948      47248
> Swap:            0          0          0


The above was with the installed on the hard drive Dapper.  If I try
the same (standard session + Firefox) from a Live CD, swapoff refuses
to run: I get a  "cannot allocate memory".    error from swapoff.

If I try without any applications running, only your default
gnome-session,  swapoff runs for a while but doesn't even complete
(error displayed is: "Killed").

So it seems on this 256mb laptop, in a Flight 7 LiveCD session, the
swap file is essential.

--
Daniel Robitaille