Sugar on a Stick

Soas is running slowly/how much persistent storage

Asked by ffleming7

I got soas recently. I started my computer and it all started fine. The problem I am having is that the whole platform seems to run very slowly, and it often comes to a complete stop. When that happens, I give up and shut down the computer by holding down the power button. I am using a 4GB flash drive. I set the persistent storage with Fedora at 1912MB. I am running soas on an old Dell desktop. I don't know the specifications of the desktop, but it is almost unusable when running Microsoft Windows. Does the state of the old computer affect soas? I am also confused about how soas uses RAM. Does it use the old computer's RAM or does it use empty space on the flash drive. If it uses empty space on the flash drive, then should I have set persistent storage lower so that there would be more empty space?

Thanks,
Frank

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James Cameron (quozl) said : 		#1

G'day Frank,

SoaS certainly does use RAM, and needs a reasonable amount of it. It
won't run if there is no RAM at all.

How much it needs depends on what you try to do.

There is a minimum amount of RAM required to boot. I'd say the minimum
is somewhere between 192Mb and 256Mb.

Each activity that is opened and not stopped is charged against
available RAM. If you don't stop activities things will eventually slow
even further. Restarting the whole computer stops all activities, of
course.

If the Log activity is present (I've not checked if it is), then
/var/log/dmesg can be viewed to check the line that looks like this:

Memory: 935012k/967868k available

You may have a particularly old CPU in the old desktop. Open the Log
activity, view /var/log/dmesg, click on the Edit tag, and enter MHz in
the search box. This might tell you the processor speed.

The Log activity can be obtained from http://activities.sugarlabs.org/

(I found it on my Sugar system already, by typing F3 then Control/2 to
display all activities, not just favourites).

I don't know if the empty space on the flash drive is used in any way,
sorry.

--
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/

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J Bohmann (jabakdb) said : 		#2

Just to concur:
I installed SoaS blueberry to my HD using zyx-liveinstaller last nite.
Have a Compaq presario with 2 GHZ Athlon XP. The behavior of SoaS is sometimes OK but often the mouse and keyboard inputs are "frozen" for up to 30 sec at a time. Then the behavior will be OK for a while. Another way to check memory, by the way, is to go to the terminal activity and type the linux command "top" for a live update of memory usage. Esc ends 'top'.

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