[techtalk] swaping & upgrading

[Robert Kiesling]

Hello all,

I'm new to this list, but I do a lot of on-line support, and I'm not that
new to Linux any more.  StarOffice (at least the older versions) used the 
Motif toolkit, which can be distributed statically linked.  It takes forever
to load, as you said.  The only thing to do about it would be to install
the complete Motif distribution on your system, but I don't know how you would
tell StarOffice to use the dynamically linked libraries.

Wrt/swap space:  Linux uses a swap partition instead of a swap file.  On a 
machine with 64 Mb of memory, you're not likely to see much disk activity,
due to the availability of RAM and Linux's disk caching.  To find out how
much swap space is allocated on the drive, you need to look at the 
partition table with fdisk (Linux's, not MS); e.g., fdisk /dev/hda for 
an IDE drive, or fdisk /dev/sda for a SCSI drive.

I think the original poster could use rpm -qa to find out what packages 
are installed on the system, though I've never done it.  There's also a 
"glint" program that provides a more informative interface to the rpm 
program.  Take a look at the rpm manual page, and the output of rpm --help.

There are a lot of sites that talk about Linux on Apples.  Take a look at
the Linux FAQ at the URL below (the lower one).  

I was going to answer this off-list, because I've seen these questions 
come up lots of times, but there seems to be a lot of people here who 
haven't looked at the newsgroups, or done heavy surfing, etc.  So I 
hope I'm not being tooo intrusive... I do a lot of on-line support, if
you couldn't tell!

Take care, 

Robert


On Tue, 23 Nov 1999, you wrote:
> One thing that comes to mind is: What other processes do you have running
> that could be sucking up resources? You can open a terminal window,type: top
> and it'll show you a continually refreshing list of the running processes,
> how much memory they are utilizing and how much CPU time they are using.
> Check it out, perhaps your machine is loading processes you don't even use,
> or processes that didn't die when you closed an application, etc.
> 
> Naomi
> 
> Elizabeth wrote:
> 
> > {snippage}
> >    b.when using (and when I installed) StarOffice it takes (took) a _very_
> > long time to load the program (as in minutes), once i'm using it its okay.
> > But I have 64 mb ram (and I think 128 swap), and from what I've read,
> > people are doing it with much less and more successfully.  Any idea why?
> > I'm using afterstep for my WM.  [Netscape does better, and only takes
> > seconds to load up]
> 
> Ditto.  I don't have the exact same set up but similar, and I have noticed
> the
> same problem with StarOffice.  Also, I agree that it seems like others on
> this
> list can make lesser machines perform better than mine.  I wonder where I'm
> going wrong...
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 
> Thanks,
> Meredith
> 
> --
> Sometimes big things
> do come in small packages...
> PintSize Graphics & Web Hosting Inc.
> http://www.pintsize.com
> 
> 
> 
> ************
> techtalk at linuxchix.org   http://www.linuxchix.org
> 
> 
> 
> ************
> techtalk at linuxchix.org   http://www.linuxchix.org
--
<a href="coffee://localhost/cream/">stop</a>

http://www.mainmatter.com/

************
techtalk at linuxchix.org   http://www.linuxchix.org