Few questions before I try to install Ubuntu

[ruscook]

As you can see I've got a machine with less than 512MB Ram, an old PIII
800Mhz and it runs X, fetchmail (2 instances - there's a reason for
this), spamassassin, dovecot-imap, apache, samba, postfix, gnome, rsync,
clamav, squirrelmail,  as well as BIND and a few other things. 

The only reason there's signficant swap in use is because fetchmail and
rsync were both running, and Rsync is VERY memory hungry building the
file lists in memory.

top - 19:12:59 up 21 days, 58 min,  0 users,  load average: 1.04, 0.96,
0.60
Tasks: 144 total,   3 running, 141 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  2.0% us,  0.7% sy, 96.5% ni,  0.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.2% hi,
0.5% si
Mem:    451848k total,   443504k used,     8344k free,   130124k buffers
Swap:   289160k total,   147236k used,   141924k free,    85708k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
27449 root      37  12 13036 9516 1164 R 97.0  2.1  10:22.95 fetchmail
 8130 ruscook   15   0 32680 3952 2876 S  1.0  0.9 279:27.61 gkrellm
 7300 root      15   0 66240 5588 2000 S  0.5  1.2 164:45.56 Xorg
 7638 gkrellmd  15   0 10640  712  588 S  0.5  0.2 181:34.55 gkrellmd
27829 ruscook   16   0  2132 1148  864 R  0.5  0.3   0:00.49 top
 5617 www-data  26  10 14136 2268 1648 S  0.2  0.5   0:00.66 apache2

This machine just chugs along and is reasonably responsive as a desktop
or as a server.

512MB as a desktop just surfing the web, using openoffice2 and reading
mail should fly and not need more than 128MB of swap really.



On Sun, 2006-02-19 at 13:47 -0500, Eric Dunbar wrote:
> On 2/19/06, Thilo Six <T.Six at gmx.de> wrote:
> > Boyan R. schrieb am 19.02.2006 17:23:
> > > My 160 Gb HD is divided in 6 partitions. First four are occupied,
> > > but fifth (5 Gb) and sixth (2.7 Gb) are free (currently both in fat32).
> >
> > This is together 7,7GB.
> > As long i use Ubuntu my swap was used max. 10MB if even that.
> > (384MB RAM).
> > Swap comes in handy if you are going to try s.th. like suspend to disk
> > or if you are forced t boot from a Live-CD.
> 
> Boyan, in your e-mail you mention that you have 512 MB of RAM. This is
> more than enough RAM for most operations, particularly if you're just
> "fooling around" to see what Ubuntu is like. Since it's enough RAM for
> regular operations, your swap partition will see relatively (very)
> little use. You can safely keep it small (e.g. 256 MB).
> 
> For e.g. on my server (YellowDogLinux) I have 256 MB of RAM and 25X MB
> swap partition. I regularly run GNOME on it with things like GIMP or
> OpenOffice.org and the machine rarely, if ever uses the swap
> partition!
> 
> > What i strongly would suggest is to create a partiontion for your /home.
> > This way your private settings are save even if you have to
> > repair/reinstall for what ever reason.
> 
> Boyan, I would recommend that you DO NOT do this for the moment.
> 
> It's a setup that has caused me to be quite lazy and has given me
> headaches in the past. Yes, it's nice to be able to repair, replace or
> upgrade the OS without touching your "home" partition, however, unless
> you're using your GNU/Linux install for your serious work, it's a PITA
> (pain-in-the-ass) IMNSHO. Also, when you only have 5 GB available,
> you're better off having that as one contiguous block than fighting to
> keep the different partitions clean.
> 
> This is causing me problems on my server... 7 GB is just not enough to
> handle the server-GNU/Linux OS properly... 7 GB server partition 25 GB
> home partition + 35 GB HFS+ for Mac OS X... I'm waiting for YellowDog
> 4.1 to be released so I start fresh with a 10 or 15 GB GNU/Linux OS
> partition, 2 GB Mac OS X/Mac OS 9 partition (for bootloading and
> trouble-shooting) and the rest of the 80 GB HD partitioned into two
> roughly equal ext3fs partitions.
> 
> And, since you are just trying out Ubuntu I'd keep things as simple as
> possible. One partition on your HD for all your Ubuntu stuff (just
> make sure you don't wipe out your other partitions).
> 
> > > I want to install Ubuntu on this 5 Gb partition. Should I manually format
> > > it into linux format, and create swap partition (I have 512 Mb Ram) ?
> > > So, basicely, should I split it to 4 Gb + 1 Gb swap manually, or when I
> > > start installing Ubuntu (latest release) it will do that automaticly for me
> > > ?
> 
> As I wrote above, don't worry too much about your swap partition. It's
> not particularly important since you're just "fooling around". It also
> doesn't really matter how big it is -- you can have it as large or as
> small as you want, and, it doesn't have to be a multiple of anything
> or as large (or larger or smaller) than your RAM.
> 
> > > Also, can Ubuntu fit on my 2.7 Gb partition ? (1.7 Gb + 1 Gb swap I guess)
> > > I just want to see how it looks and works (for the start)
> 
> I suspect that you could probably install a really slim Ubuntu install
> into your 2.7 GB partition.
> 
> > > If I MUST create swap partition manually, should I make it exactly 1024 Mb,
> > > or is it better to make it little larger (just in case) ?
> 
> You could just as easily make your swap 10 MB!!! No size requirement
> (keep in mind that 512 MB real RAM allows you a lot of lee-way...
> though, you probably want to have at least 64 MB of swap, if not a bit
> more).
> 
> > > I guess there is no risk of losing my current boot menu ?
> 
> I know nothing about Windows/IBM PC clones but it does seem to me that
> you might be at risk of losing your current boot menu if it's
> different from the one Ubuntu uses.
> 
> > > I hope somebody will find some time to answer me :(
> 
> I'm sure I won't the second and last one to (half-assedly) answer your
> questions ;-).
> 
> Eric.
> 
> -- 
> ubuntu-users mailing list
> ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users
Kind Regards Russell
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