On 06/10/2013 02:25 AM, Nio Wiklund wrote:
I think the difference is *already installed swap*
and it is probably not told to the newbies clearly enough, how
important it is when the RAM is low.
If you start with a computer without linux, there will be no
swap, and if the RAM is below 1 GB (or maybe below 768MB), you
should start editing the partitions with for example gparted, and
at least create swap. I think it is too late at the partitioning
page of the installer (if the you reach that page at all).
Nio, and all:
The comment about "already-installed swap" may be of particular
significance in my case.
When I install from a live CD/DVD, I (almost?) always do manual
partitioning (the "Something Else" choice).
From not knowing otherwise, and also a bit of "programmers'
superstition", even though there was a pre-existing swap partition
on the disk, I would always click on the existing swap partition,
and click the "Change" button.
In the dialog that came up, there was nothing there that actually
needed to be changed, so I would just click on the OK button,
hoping that the installer now knew about the swap partition.
From what I have read in this e-mail stream, what I have been doing
may have had the opposite effect from what I intended.
It may be that if I had left the swap partition alone, the
installer would have found it, and all would have been well. But
where I selected the swap partition, and clicked "Change", it now
became a newly-created swap partition, and was possibly not
available to the installer.
By the way, I yesterday installed Xubuntu 13.04 on my 450
megahertz machine with 512 meg of RAM. In that install, I did not
click on the pre-existing swap partition, instead, letting the
installer find it.
I had put a system-resource monitor in the task bar (which includes
the amount of swap space), and throughout the installation (I used
the "Try Xubuntu" button), I monitored the swap space used.
From the very beginning, it showed there was swap space available
(in the expected amount), and during the install, it used some of
that space (a maximum of 63 megabytes, as I recall).
In this install, to test this, I did not remove the Ubiquity
slide-show package.
The installation went successfully to completion, and did not
crash.
Unfortunately, I cannot conclusively say that leaving the
pre-existing swap partition alone in the manual-partitioning was
the difference that made it work, because I did the installation
from a USB stick with a persistance area on the USB. I had to do
that because Xubuntu won't fit on a CD, and a CD-drive is all that
machine has.
What I am sure of, is that it used that pre-existing swap
partition throughout the installation.
Again, the installation above was of Xubuntu (not Lubuntu). But
the problem where I have to remove the Ubiquity slide-show for the
installation to succeed on systems having only 512 megabytes of
RAM, has happened to me (in the past) on Lubuntu, Ubuntu, Xubuntu,
and UbuntuStudio.
-- Sincerely, Aere
