[ale] Live CD to drop on my Dad's computer over thanksgiving?

[Joshua Kite]

Most of my experience with Knoppix has been with machines where Knoppix
could find a swap file. I understand the speed of a RAM disk, but I was
thinking that the system would eventually use all of the available RAM, and
the system would be forced to begin swapping. To be honest, though, I never
thought about the CD spin-up/down time making Knoppix slow. Thanks for
pointing that out. My point, though, I believe still stands. Live CD's are
great, but when using them to demonstrate the power of Linux, it's worth
noting to whoever is experiencing the demo that a Live CD should perform
worse than an actual Linux install.

On 11/14/05, Jeff Hubbs <hbbs at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> Joshua Kite wrote:
>
> > Maybe I've been attributing sluggishness to the wrong thing, but I
> > assumed that the RAM disk also made a difference. Doesn't that lead
> > to full memory and making more use of the swap file?
>
> Unless Knoppix automatically finds and fires up an existing swap
> partition on a hard disk (which is generally going to be a safe
> operation in all cases unless it's a machine that is hibernated) or is
> made to do so, the machine runs swaplessly. RAM disk is far from a
> sluggishness source; it's the fastest filesystem you can make! Really,
> it's CD-ROM spin-up/down and overall I/O rate that makes Knoppix slow;
> that's the case with most LiveCDs. Even a Gentoo LiveCD will do that
> when you type shell commands that haven't been used yet.
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...