LinuxMusicians

Hey all,

I installed KX from the LiveDVD (12.04.3-32) on a Dell Inspiron 4150 hoping it would be useable. This is a circa 2003~2004 system, P4/2.0, 512 MB RAM, 32MB ATI video chip.

It 'works' in that KDE 4.11 and various desktop stuff seem to run well enough... except that there is a TON of hard disk swapping no matter what is being done. It probably adds like 3-4 minutes to the boot time of pure HDD thrashing. I understand this is a very limited low-memory system and I expected some swapping but this is way worse than I'd hoped.

So here's the thing - I'd already wiped all the HDD partitions so I let the installer do the automatic disk configuration. I checked with 'df -h' and the tempfs partition is tiny! 100MB? I thought this should be more like 2GB? Would increasing the size of the swap partition help with the amount of disk thrashing or is trying to run on this system really a lost cause?

Yeah that is going to happen if your running the kde desktop enviroment, it is not light on resources.

yoiu only have 512mb of ram and last i checked, on a clean install of kx studio with kde it sits about 600-700mb of ram usage.

You'd be better of using a much lighter DE, light LXDE.
though even then ive just checked my memory usage and right now with firefox open im sitting at 1.4gb.

There was a light ubuntu distro i tried that booted up with just under 100mg, it might have been lubuntu.

But im guessing once you add kx studio stuff the memory footprint is going to shoot up, as running jack takes about 230mb then the alsa jack bridges if you use them take up another 100mb.


If your planning on doing any sort of audio editing you really want to upgrade the ram in the machine to about 2gb.