[Gllug] Debian file system

[Rich Walker]

NorthLondon John <northlondonjohn at yahoo.co.uk> writes:

> Hi,
>
> I've spent much of the last two days installing Debian on an old (266mhz, 64mb ram) laptop, using
> the 4th beta of the new installer.
> It's been a horrendous experience, and if I hadn't spent so much time on it, and hadn't got most
> things working, I'd dump it for slackware.

You have filed bug reports on the problems with the install?

> The last hardware problem I have is with the cdrom. This is acessible by root, but not by any
> users. It's not a permissions problem - the error I get when trying, eg, to play an audio cd, is:
>
> mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on dev/hdc,
> or too many mounted file systems
>
> In the course of looking into this, I found some oddities with the filesystem:
> 1:  /dev/hdc has two entries in the fstab - /cdrom and /media/cdrom

That's normal - recent FHS changes created /media, but The Rest Of The
World assumes /cdrom - including various debian tools

> 2: fstab has swap on /dev/hda5 - 165mb according to system monitor; kdiskfree doesn't show this, but
> has tmpfs mounted at /dev/shm (size: 30.4mb, free 30.4mb, Full% 0.0%). What is tmpfs? Is it
> equivalent to swap? Why don't the numbers add up?

Tmpfs is a special type of fs used for "temporary" data. Basically, it
behaves like a swappable RAM disk - when RAM is scarce, it gets swapped
out to disk.



> Also, it's extremely slow. I don't expect to break the land speed record on old hardware, but
> performance is far worse than Slack or even Win98. I can't believe this is Deb's natural speed, so I
> presume there's some misconfiguration, or at least some tricks for optimization. Where do I start
> looking?

Output of top when machine idle?

Also, check to see if it is swapping furiously - I wouldn't *try* to run
KDE on a machine with 64MB of ram.


HTH

cheers, Rich.


> PS: Using kernel 2.6.3 - if that's relevent. (2.4 screwed things up, for some unknown reason.)
>
> TIA
>
> John
>
>
>
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