newbie: no swap

[fillemon]

hello people, new to vectorlinux, and also quite to linux.
shifted to it because all the distro's i had seen were soooo slow.
i thougt: let's buy a new pc (windows or linux) or  just looking for a fast os.

now i installed everything, but it didn't run that fast, i took a look at the free memory
and i see: no swap installed. That' is weird, i thought i chose one.

anyway, is it possible after alinux installation to install a swap
and if so : how to do it.
please guide me through it, if it is to much work, i just do a clean install again
but this might be a way to start learning it

thanx a lot
bye bye

[nightflier]

Hi, and welcome to Vector Linux.

Learning is good. Since you are willing to experiment some, try this: Open a terminal (command line), type "su" (without the quotes) and hit enter. It will ask for your root password. You will not see anything as you type the password. Hit enter. Now highlight and copy this line:
fdisk -l
Click in the terminal, hit key combinations Shift + Insert. You should see the text get pasted into the terminal. Hit enter. In the resulting output, look for a line something like this:
/dev/sdb1               1        2890      997027   82  Linux swap

Next, enter this command into the terminal:
mcedit /etc/fstab

Look for a section like this:
# Swap partitions
# The 'sw' option means auto activating with 'swapon -a'

Add a line, using the information from the previous command, in this case:
/dev/sdb1   none   swap   sw   0  0

Hit F2 to save, F10 to exit.

Lastly, issue command "swapon -a" (or reboot).

[fillemon]

thanx for the fast reply,
when i do fdisk-l  i don't get a swap drive
i see two linux partitions,

one of 1gb, and the other of 8 gb.
they carry both 83 as number. and both are linux entiteld.

thank you in advance

[uelsk8s]

open a teminal as root and run cfdisk
select the 1Gig partition
choose type from them menu then press enter a few times till your back at the first cfdisk screen
your partition should be labeled as linux swap now
choose write from the menu then quit
now run "mkswap /dev/sda2"  (with your correct device name of course)
then add the line to /etc/fstab and finish as shown above

[fillemon]

it works, thanx a lot everyone,
i got the swap 

but stil the responsness of the system is low
like opening firefox takes 3 seconds, on a 1200pIII with 512meg ram
is this normal, ot should i step back to a lighter version ? or can i speed
it up by some options ?

thank you

[overthere]

like opening firefox takes 3 seconds

Well...I sometimes find myself standing in front of the microwave saying hurryUP..lol...but

I think 3 sec's for firefox is reasonable and may be similar on any OS..but to each their own.

vl-light has the opera browser which I think is quicker on slow systems, it is also available in vl-std 5.9

I rarely use the opening speed of firefox or any browser as a guage for the quickness of a system..if this is helpfull


cheers

[nightflier]

Full featured modern browsers are far from lightweights. 3 seconds is about right for Firefox on that vintage machine. Opera does seem to have a speed advantage, give it a try. Having more than one browser is a good idea anyways, as they are different. Some sites do better in one than the other. Dig into that huge selection of free software and have fun with it.

[fillemon]

aha, thank you very much to give me some indication about this.
but indeed opening firefox is not really a "benchmark" 

well i guess i have to work with it more to feel the real speed. still i thought it would
be lighting fast. the thing i was always looking for.

so what do you pay attention to for speed of a OS ?
for me speed is more about responness, not if it can calculate or codec very fast.

if i want to go faster i could do a few things ?
buy more ram ?
get a faster laptop overal

run a windowmanager instead of a desktop envirement ?

or choose an even faster distro ? puppy maybe ?

what do you think of it
thanx very much
greetings

[uelsk8s]

if you want responsiveness you can use a CK kernel http://vectorlinux.osuosl.org/veclinux-5.9/kernels/kernel-2.6.22.18-ck1-i586-1vl59.tlz

IT will give you the perception that the OS is faster if thats what you are looking for.

[fillemon]

hello thank you, i looked it up to see what ck kernel is 

still recompiling is not a newby trick, i tried it once and very fast it became clear to me, that my own processing power was to low.

i have red that the speed of almost any distro is very dependent on the software you run on it, and also the sevices.

what good is it to take puppylinux if i need openoffice. it's like a supersmall distro with a software giant on it.
from what i have seen on other fora, looking for the ck kernel: they advice to work only with the superfast apps; and disable all the services you don't need. (i guess it is a bit like windows) so that's quite some work to learn what services you need or not. but hé, gotta learn sometimes.

[lagagnon]

but stil the responsness of the system is low
like opening firefox takes 3 seconds, on a 1200pIII with 512meg ram

that is pretty darn good for a P1200 - Firefox is a large piece of software that consumes considerable RAM to get it loaded. It takes 4 seconds to load it on my XP3200 using VL5.9 Standard. I certainly wouldn't be complaining!

[fillemon]

well thank you very much for the compliment 

it's a dell latitude of 4 years old. still running strong.

i hoped for some unbelievable speeld. i think windows is almost as fast on this machine (new install). then with the linux. offcourse if i can trade in firefox for dillo, it will become an advantage.

btw: i just have downloaded puppylinux, i wanna see how fast this is, i'm gonna put a dual boot.
can i use the swap drive of vector as the swap of another linux distro ?

i'll report what i think of it;
just for fun, although i think it will be to light, (not enough packages on it- and as a newby, i'm having a hard time installing those things);

thanx a lot

[nightflier]

Yes, the swap partition can be shared between Linux installs (or even be used by Live CD's)

If you want lightning speed, boot to "linux-tui" and use lynx for browsing, mc for file management, nano for text editing. Of course, you will be exchanging features for speed 

Now that I think about it, this would probably be the fastest of all: http://www.freedos.org/ .. you'll be at that C:\ prompt in seconds! 

[fillemon]

haha, indeed some dos on it.
i still have books from those days, dos undocumented and things like that.
that was indeed lighting fast. for fun i runned it once on my laptop, speedy it was.

well maybe i'm asking to much,
thanx for the answer of the swap partition, i'm gonna give puppylinux a try.

[uelsk8s]

you dont need to compile the CK kernel the link i posted is to a precompiled VL CK kernel