this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2024
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Y'all need to point me towards one of those tiny Linux systems. I have an old no-longer-bricked Toshiba Satellite that somebody gave me and I got it to boot again, so I slapped Mint on it to see how I liked it since I've never messed with that distro before. The only problem is this sucker is a dog, it's only got 2 gigs of RAM and a pokey 5400 RPM platter drive in it. The thing sits there and thrashes swap constantly even when it's doing nothing, and when Mint is creating one of its automated system image rollback things it's completely unusable. I'm surprised the laptop platters don't escape their casing and bore into the Earth like a drill bit.
I found that it will... eventually... load and run the latest FreeCAD build and once it's going it's actually not bad (awful screen resolution and single touch only trackpad notwithstanding). But getting there when taken altogether takes about 20 minutes...
If you can afford it, a SSD will significant improve your life. Also, any more memory will help.
As others said, you can disable swap.
Are you running the xfce version of Mint? It's significantly less resources.
Be careful with disabling swap if you don't have a very large amount of RAM, as many apps rely on memory overcommitment and a large virtual address space, which can behave erratically without swap.
You'd be better off keeping swap enabled and instead setting
vm.swappiness = 0in sysctl.conf.Swappiness is a value between 0 and 100, where 0 means to never swap unless absolutely necessary (only if you completely run out of RAM), and 100 means all programs and data will be swapped nearly instantly. Think of it like a target for the percentage of RAM to keep available. The default is usually 40 which is fine for a low-RAM system, but swaps way too often for a system with more RAM.
Thank you, I did have that wrong.
I use bunsenlabs helium on my old vaio a series laptop. I use a 32 bit non pae build bc it's a pentium M that might not support pae. It uses a window manager over a desktop environment.
I'd recommend using a 32 bit distro as they tend to take up a little less ram.
Also I'm on a 4200 rpm PATA HDD. It has 2 gb of ddr ram. It's slightly too old to get ddr2 which is unfortunate.
More than enough for MX Linux with Xfce. But it's not going to make your applications a whole lot faster.
can you not disable swap? force it to stick to physical RAM.
You absolutely need swap on a low RAM system. It's the only way the system will actually be usable. You'll hit OOMs (out of memory errors) that take down the whole GUI if you turn off swap on a system with only 2GB RAM. You can only really turn off swap if you have a very large amount of RAM, and even then, it's safer to keep it enabled and set swappiness to 0 instead.
most of these old systems dont have soldered RAM a few extra gig of DDR2 RAM would be dirt cheap on ebay too
If you can find it :) DDR2 is old enough that a lot of it has been thrown out as e-waste. If you're lucky, you may be able to find some at a computer/electronics recycler for free.
plenty on ebay
Arch, with XFCE and the strict bare minimum. Ex : midori instead of firefox, etc. Don't dream about CAD
Antix will run on old grey boxes with mb of ram, it oughta work for you too.