RAM usage

[amcmorl at gmail.com (Angus McMorland)]

On 18/09/2007, Juergen Fiedler <juergen at fiedlerfamily.net> wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 15, 2007 at 11:42:26AM +1200, Angus McMorland wrote:
> > On 15/09/2007, Tzafrir Cohen <tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com> wrote:
> [...]
> > > First off, use a swap partition.
> >
> > I can't touch the HDs of these machines - they're used for teaching by
> > day. That's one of the benefits of the live CD approach in this case.
>
> I found that a cheap USB HD works well in such a scenario. OK, it
> works fine until your $29 4G drive starts getting flaky and the people
> who sold you the item don't have a replacement so you settle for a
> flash drive, which works for regular data, but not as a swap
> partition.
>
> So if you could spend a bit more than $29, you could carry your swap
> partition around with you and maybe even have some space left to store
> some of your files more frequently used files.

That certainly sounds like a good plan for a small number of
computers, thanks. I'm running a whole lab with of a bunch of
identical CDs, and 15*$30 = $450, which is more than I care to spend
at the moment.

To everyone, I have successfully created a 686 flavoured GD, which is
now working beautifully. Thanks for all your suggestions. It might be
a good idea to make a bit clearer on the wiki what is the implication
of the 486 default flavour for use on modern machines - I imagine I'm
not the only one it's surprised. Is the wiki for anyone to edit? If
so, I can happily do this myself.

To solve the problem of files I needed often (but might want to change
from time to time) I made sure the CD included ssh, then just scp in a
launcher script from a server machine, and use that launcher script to
pull in everything else I need. Saving output files is also done by
scp. Thanks to developers of live-helper - it's  a great tool.

Angus.
-- 
AJC McMorland, PhD Student
Physiology, University of Auckland