Use Linux Swap Partition at Boot?

[ewangr]

Am trying to get Knoppix running on a PII 266 machine that has over 500 Gigs of HD, but only 64 megs of RAM.

Knoppix sees only 48 megs of RAM on boot, which wouldn't be a problem if I could convince it to use the swap partition (/dev/hda2) I already setup with System Rescue CD. But while it looks for a Windows partition to create a swap file on, I can't see any way to tell knoppix to use the Linux swap partition. And since I don't have a copy of Windows, setting up a small unformatted FAT32 partition doesn't seem like a good idea.

Help, please.

[mzilikazi]

It *should* use your linux swap. Dunno what System Rescue CD is but simply creating a partition for swap isn't enough. You must format it too. For example:

mkswap /dev/hda2

[ewangr]

Well, I "thought" I had done that, but it's possible I just setup the partition.

Assuming it's setup correctly, you're saying it should automatically recognize the partition as available and use it? This is from the Live CD version (since I want to run that first before doing an HD Install).

I gather I might also want to use mem=64M to get Knoppix to recognize the full memory available - or is that only good for 128M?

Thanks!

[gruntbuggly]

> Assuming it's setup correctly, you're saying it should automatically recognize the partition as available and use it?

The Live CD scans for swap partitions at every boot, and starts using any it finds. The following will sort you out:

mkswap /dev/hda2
<reboot>
cat /etc/fstab | grep hda2
cat /proc/swaps

The output from the third line will show what kind of format Knoppix thinks /dev/hda2 has. The fourth line will show what swap space is actually being used.

[A. Jorge Garcia]

Speaking of PII 266s, I just recently encountered 2 PIIs that won't boot the latest KNOPPIX liveCD. When it scans for files on scd0, it can't find the file system and drops to a "limited KNOPPIX menu."

However, these PCs boot from my old 3.3, 3.2 and 3.1 CDs I have lying around. All the CDs were burned the same way on the same burner. This is really weird. I've never had a problem like this before. Is there something fundamentally different about the 3.4 file system on the liveCD?

BTW, one PC is a PII-266 with 159MB RAM and the other is a PII-350 with 64MB of RAM. On the 64MB PC, only 45MB are used for the ramdisk (using the pre 3.4 CDs that boot). Using a swap file, no matter how large, really dosn't spead things up much, it just allows KDE to start-up when it wouldn't otherwise. Also, I can't repartition the 6GB hdd with a swapfile on hda1, so how do I setup a swap partition the use qtparted and knoppix-installer on this dinosaur?

Stumped,
AJG

[mzilikazi]

Speaking of PII 266s, I just recently encountered 2 PIIs that won't boot the latest KNOPPIX liveCD. When it scans for files on scd0, it can't find the file system and drops to a "limited KNOPPIX menu."

However, these PCs boot from my old 3.3, 3.2 and 3.1 CDs I have lying around. All the CDs were burned the same way on the same burner. This is really weird. I've never had a problem like this before. Is there something fundamentally different about the 3.4 file system on the liveCD?

BTW, one PC is a PII-266 with 159MB RAM and the other is a PII-350 with 64MB of RAM. On the 64MB PC, only 45MB are used for the ramdisk (using the pre 3.4 CDs that boot). Using a swap file, no matter how large, really dosn't spead things up much, it just allows KDE to start-up when it wouldn't otherwise. Also, I can't repartition the 6GB hdd with a swapfile on hda1, so how do I setup a swap partition the use qtparted and knoppix-installer on this dinosaur?

Stumped,
AJG

Old boxes and old cdrom drives.....what are ya gonna do. Doesn't Knoppix boot diffferently now w/ isolinux than it previously did?

As far as the catch-22 w/ the swapfile goes......simply boot knoppix to run level 2 and partition the drive w/ cfdisk. Of course one of those parts needs to be swap! It couldn't be easier.

[A. Jorge Garcia]

Yes, I was going to try cfdisk in knoppix 2. However, I'd prefer to use qtparted so as not to loose the data on hda1, just resize it to make room for a swap partition on hda2 and a knoppix partition on hda3. Even so, I'll only be able to knoppix-installer 3.3!

Thanx,
AJG

[eco2geek]

I recently ran Knoppix on an old P200 with 64M of RAM and an AMD K6/266 with 128M RAM. The trick to getting it to recognize the CD drive as /dev/scd0 is to use the "nodma" cheatcode on both computers.

On the P200, Knoppix stops in its tracks, annouces it doesn't have enough memory to run KDE, and offers to create a swap file on an existing partition (much like it creates a persistent home directory in a file).

If there's a FAT32 partition (or ext2/3) with 60M of space available, it'll work.

And it automatically finds it on the next boot.

So, no need to create a separate swap partition just to run the live CD.

[ewangr]

FWIW, I had the swap partition but had not done a mkswap as was originally guessed. Silly me...

Per the other few comments here, I'm wondering if there is any benefit to making my swap larger to speed things up. Currently have 1 gig of the HD set to swap, but am thinking I might get better performance with 2 gig?

Was thinking of trying the alternate desktops as well, but I gather OpenOffice will only run under KDE, and I think that's the only Linux product that will let me read/write MS Word compatible files. Would love to find out I'm wrong on this.

Finally, anyone who could point me to a solution for getting my Linksys WUSB11 v2.8 (uses the Atmel chipse) recognized and working? I thought I saw that Knoppix already included this driver, but so far no luck getting the network up and running.

Thanks again for all the help!

[A. Jorge Garcia]

Right, but you can't repartition hda1 with qtparted if you have a *.swp file in hda1.

I tried knoppix 2 on the 64MB PC and got 3.3 to boot. I could only get cfdisk to work here.

So I tried again without KNOPPIX 2. KNOPPIX wanted to setup a *.swp file, I said no. Then I could run qtparted. However, when I created the new partitions, they turned out to be only "logical" partitions, so I couldn't format them. Then knoppix-installer only found hda1, no bloody hda2, no bloody hda3.

Regards,
AJG

PS: nodma, hmmm....