Knoppix with low memory?

[billyjobob]

I have given a Knoppix 3.2 CD to a friend who has only 64 megs of RAM. If it doesn't work he will expect me to instruct him what to do, but since my system has 512 megs, I have no idea how it will work. Also I don't know how swapfiles work, because I have no DOS partitions myself to experiment with.

1. Will it boot into KDE sucessfully? If not, can he boot into text mode and make a swapfile, then boot into KDE?

2. Will it offer the suggestion to make a swapfile, or must he do this himself?

3. Once the swapfile is made will it automatically find and use it on subsequent boots, or must it be remade each time?

[Stephen]

#1 I read in a post on debian-knoppix mailing list from Klaus that he has got it to boot KDE on a 486 with 32mb plus swap (it takes about 10-15 minutes) so I can not see why not, I think recommended ram is 96mb for kde so it probably will be slow.

#2 I believe you have to boot and use an option from menu although if you could find the script that creates the swap file you should be able to run it from a text boot. If he used something like Partition Magic he could resize his windows partition and create a linux swap partition.

#3 It scans for swap on boot at least linux swap and I would assume fat if you made one I don't use fat so I have not checked into it.

[Dave_Bechtel]

--Tell him to upgrade his RAM for Godsake; anybody using less than 128M these days is losing out. Only exceptions are certain laptops and REALLY OLD machines that can't handle any more RAM.

--If he has minimal RAM and no swap, it will refuse to boot into KDE. Here's what you can do:

boot: ' knoppix 2 '
' mkdosswapfile ' == (script) - make at least 128M if you have the disk space, and create a type-82 Linux swap partition ASAP

--After that, you can ' su knoppix ' and ' startx ' and KDE should come up.

--If there is a file ' knoppix.swp ' detected at boot, it will be auto-activated.


I have given a Knoppix 3.2 CD to a friend who has only 64 megs of RAM. If it doesn't work he will expect me to instruct him what to do, but since my system has 512 megs, I have no idea how it will work. Also I don't know how swapfiles work, because I have no DOS partitions myself to experiment with.

1. Will it boot into KDE sucessfully? If not, can he boot into text mode and make a swapfile, then boot into KDE?

2. Will it offer the suggestion to make a swapfile, or must he do this himself?

3. Once the swapfile is made will it automatically find and use it on subsequent boots, or must it be remade each time?

[RockMumbles]

I'm running a 64MB p200 with a linux swap partition and it is kind of slow but works, it will run KDE but icewm or xfce are quite a bit faster. If you want to run konqueror, or other kde apps you almost might as well run KDE.

I like morphix-LightGUI on older machines it has phoenix for a lightweight browser with really nice fonts, abiword for a word processor, and uses icewm for a wm (no KDE apps).

rock

[billyjobob]

Thanks for all your advice. I will suggest a RAM upgrade. Morphix-LightGUI looks very interesting.

After some experimentation I found I could simulate a low memory system by booting with:
knoppix mem=64M noswap

In this situation Knoppix does prompt to create a swapfile. If the swapfile cannot be created, then Knoppix will load TWM instead of KDE. Some of the menus are in German and many programs don't work, but it is useable. If the swapfile is created then KDE will load but is very very slow.

[Andrew Foster]

Hi there,

I would be inclined to say forget about KDE - Knoppix 3.2 ships with KDE 3.1 which is pretty heavyweight despite various performance related options.

I recommend using either WindowMaker or Blackbox. They would be fine on a Pentium 90 with 64MB RAM for example. Your major problem then is apps;

- Web; Mozilla will take ages to start ( > 30 seconds ) - consider using Phoenix (not sure if Knoppix comes with it) which is somewhat better. For mega lightweight use Links - depending on your terminal setup you *can* use a mouse, too.

- Office; OpenOffice will take longer especially the first time you click on it in a session. Check out Lyx or write plain text using any given text editor.

- Email; Evolution similarly is a bit heavy. Depending on your mail setup, Mutt is totally worth learning a few key shortcuts - it rocks.

Cheers, Andrew

[rickenbacherus]

Yee-haw got Knoppix 3.2 booted on a 333Mhz w/32M ram. It's a dog but it does run! Just a little experiment I suppose.

[indra]

I have given a Knoppix 3.2 CD to a friend who has only 64 megs of RAM. If it doesn't work he will expect me to instruct him what to do, but since my system has 512 megs, I have no idea how it will work. Also I don't know how swapfiles work, because I have no DOS partitions myself to experiment with.

1. Will it boot into KDE sucessfully? If not, can he boot into text mode and make a swapfile, then boot into KDE?

2. Will it offer the suggestion to make a swapfile, or must he do this himself?

3. Once the swapfile is made will it automatically find and use it on subsequent boots, or must it be remade each time?