> I have a question about switching desktops. If I switch my desktop to > a different desktop, does ubuntu write the desktop that I am > navigating away from to swap so that the memory is freed up? I have > limited ram on my ubuntu desktop. Only 512Mb. So I'm wondering if the > memory is freed up (for the most part) from the desktop I'm leaving, > and made available to the desktop that I am navigating to.
Switching workspaces only changes your perspective. The processes on the other workspaces (the ones not active) are still running, even if the windows are not currently visible. There would be very limited advantage to writing the graphical representation to disk, which is a very expensive operation in general, especially if it is likely that the workspace will reappear very soon. If you have several processes running that you don't need at any particular moment, it would be better to end them (using the quit command in the program or SIGKILL from the kill command), or stop them (SIGSTOP from the kill command) to be resumed when needed (SIGCONT from the kill command). `man kill` and `man ps` have more info on process management. Of course, the kill command should NEVER be used without understanding what you're doing very, very well. But quitting the applications that you don't mind seeing stopped might be a good idea, rather than switching workspaces. -- Mark Holmquist Student, Computer Science University of Redlands marktrac...@gmail.com _______________________________________________ LinuxUsers mailing list LinuxUsers@socallinux.org http://socallinux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxusers
