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How easy is it to install Linux?

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RootbeaR's Avatar
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06-Dec-2007, 10:43 AM #1
How easy is it to install Linux?
A friend of mine bought a HP a6218x last night with Vista home primo installed.

1.6 GHz duo-core pentium
2 GB ram

I installed Vista, created recovery discs and popped in PCLinuxOS.

Clicked install, use existing and erase partitions.

Automatically created root, home and swap partitions. Not how I would have done it, but done.

It created 7.8 GB root, I would have went 10 Gb. It created a 2 GB Swap, I would've went 1 GB.

Done.

Using it now, Vista is gone.

How hard is that?

1/2 hour installed and updated.

Vista took two hours to set up, after being pre-installed. (not updated)
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RobLinux's Avatar
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06-Dec-2007, 12:19 PM #2
The swap space needs to be as large as RAM for "hibernate" & "resume" feature to work reliably. So 1GB swap would be a bit dodgy under some workloads (though usually you will not have 1GB of state). BTW I'm not saying it does work reliably, just when ACPI type stuff does get super solid, having more swap space, will help machine in future.
RootbeaR's Avatar
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06-Dec-2007, 03:25 PM #3
Quote:
Originally Posted by RobLinux
The swap space needs to be as large as RAM for "hibernate" & "resume" feature to work reliably. So 1GB swap would be a bit dodgy under some workloads (though usually you will not have 1GB of state). BTW I'm not saying it does work reliably, just when ACPI type stuff does get super solid, having more swap space, will help machine in future.
Thanks.
I won't bother changing it then.
Was going to because I have never seen my RAM more than half utilized and have never seen swap used.
RobLinux's Avatar
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06-Dec-2007, 07:53 PM #4
Could go the other way then. Not have a swap at all. That forces pages to be freed, rather than paged out, but that means "bloat" from applications stays in RAM, if you ever got the situation where the system would rather cache say disk blocks, than keep "dirty" pages in memory. If you do reduce it, I'm sure it'll work, unless you do start using memory intensive stuff, perhaps a Virtual Box or VMware for example. Last time they tried to change the VM, so it *had* to be as big as RAM, it caused too many problems, as lots of ppl had expanded RAM without swap. The distro can't take the risk though and set it up "wrong".

If you're short of space, perhaps you could not have swap, format and use it for something, then use a swap file if you ever need 3GB of VM?

PS. I installed Win98SE today, and guess what it crashed! And needed a few reboots and though it's "working" it's still not right and gonna need a re-do.
RootbeaR's Avatar
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06-Dec-2007, 09:22 PM #5
Thanks for the info. I'm just leaving it the way it is.

Space isn't a problem.

298.9GB for the home partition.
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