musher0 wrote:when the system starts using the swapfile, you always notice a performance hit because disk access is what, 100 times slower than RAM access? And a slow system is no fun.
Don't I know it. I'm fighting a slow system all the time with Carolite-1.2 on a pendrive. I still don't know what's causing it. I've tested by booting pfix=ram and pfix=nocopy, but nothing seems to make a difference. Maybe Firefox38 is just too heavy for Carolite, I don't know, and it's driving me nuts. And why is my save file 537Mb? No idea, nor what to do about it all. If you have any ideas, they would be most appreciated.
We obviously need some swap space to avoid a system freeze
I just suffered a system freeze while watching a video in Firefox and had to do a hard poweroff. Lost all my additions to bookmarks. I hate it when that happens. Time lost.
It could have been because I sill don't have a swap file or partiton. I was waiting to ask you: Can I format a swap partition in that 3rd, unallocated, 1.25Gb partition even though the pendrive has already had Carolite installed on it? Formatting an unallocated partition won't mess with the partiton table or the MBR? Also: if the 3rd partiton can be formatted as a swapfile, should I do it while in another OS so that the Carolite pendrive isn't mounted? Or is it OK so long as the new partition isn't mounted? (Sorry to sound like a boob but I'm pretty new to partitions and formatting.)
maybe you've heard of the f2fs file system for pendrives?
I did read about it somewhere, but I thought it was too experimental and maybe wouldn't support all of Puppy Linux's files. (Unless it's been perfected since that Samsung article was written.)
There should be a pet for the f2fs utilities, if your Puppy doesn't have them already in /sbin as mkfs.f2fs, in /usr/lib as libf2fs, etc
.
I did a search for anything with "f2fs" and came up dry. But the Package Manager says that the Carolina repo has f2fs-tools-1.2.0-i486.pet. Would I use that or v.1.4 in the archlinux repo? (Being new to all this, I'm hesitant to use .pets that weren't adapted specifically for my OS.)
But is it really okay to install a Puppy, say Carolite, on f2fs? Are the f2fs tools all that's needed to make everything work right? What about all those weird Puppy system files and the terminal commands?
Anyway, my immediate chore is making that swap partition and seeing if it helps things. Plus if you have any suggestions about Carolite's slowness (or my excessively large save file, or the ff38 question).
Sorry to burden you with all my problems, but I've gotten bogged down with Carolite just like I did with Puppeee-4.4. I find Puppies that I like, but there's always something important that doesn't work and I can't fix. It seems like the developers went from one Puppy to the other without ever perfecting any of them, leaving them all half-finished, like broken toys.
Frisbee in Carolite is a good example of this. It's posterior to Pwireless2 but doesn't have Pwireless2's functionality, and actually doesn't even work right (no way to switch wifi connections without deleting the current profile). The only advance of Frisbee over Pwireless2 was that it resolves the more recent WPA keys. Carolite has certain improvements over Puppeee-4.4, but other things like Frisbee slipped backwards.
But if you will help me out here a little more with Carolite, maybe I can get it to work for me.
Cheers.
Mike