[Techtalk] So quiet

[Magni Onsoien]

Jennifer Davis:
> I have also added a couple of 256MB sticks of RAM to my PC.  At $CDN45.00
> for 256MB, I couldn't refuse.  The 512MB added to the previous 128 gives
> me 640MB.  640KB is good enough for Bill Gates, but 640MB is good for
> me.  I reinstalled Slackware and now don't use swap space.

You _might_ regret that. Swap is always useful, especially if you run
greedy applications like Netscape, databasestuff, an experimental
(including the scripts you use) webserver etc. I have 512MB on my computer,
and a couple of time it has actually started swapping. Running 'free'
and see that all the RAM and half of the swap is in actual use is a
funny feeling, and I was happy I had the swap :)

Of course you might not be running such applications or it doesn't mind
you too much if your computer crashed due to lack of memory (it would
have happened to me twice this year due to memory leaks in Netscape, and
a normal person (I am NOT normal when it comes to uptime of my hosts! At
least not from my mum's view..) would probably not mind about that.

If you suddenly need swap, you can use a swapfile on any partition(s)
with free space.

A thing you may experiment with if you have a swap partition, is shmfs
or tmpfs or whatever it's called. I think it works more or less like
tmpfs (or whatever it's called :)) on FreeBSD and Solaris, i.e. that
your /tmp is allocated from the free swap space. Thus you may have both
a liberal amount of /tmp and of swap without wasting too much diskspace
(but of course /tmp will then be nuked at boot).
You may also set up squid to use swap for caching, I think, or at least
user the shmfs /tmp. 

For a discussion on swap and what amounts are recommended, see
http://uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0101.3/1221.html and follow
the thread via "Next in thread" links.

> why??? jsut because I can.

That's the attitude :)

> I don't know if I am ready to offer much support.  I am getting better at
> working the computer.  I am not an IT professional, I am a legal
> secretary.  I wonder if I have made a wrong career choice..then again
> hacking a PC is not the true measure of a professional.

On the other hand, you may experience that the combination of your
profession and your skills may get you cool jobs in the future
(especially when the market heats up again).


Magni :)
-- 
sash is very good for you.