Installing on new SSD (no Swap?)

[kazakore]

I am upgrading my computer from a spinning disk HDD with 4GB RAM to a SSD with 16GB of RAM and so was wondering about installing KXStudio with no Swap partition but can find nothing on it. I found this[1] article on optimisations for SSDs once installed but nothing on if installation should be the same or not. Most discussions and articles that come up from Gooling are at least a couple of years old and all seem to imply Swap is always needed, or at least best to have. Although they don't say if you can get away with a lot less (rather than the usual commendation of 1-2 times RAM) to save eating space on the SSD... Sure many of you are now running on SSDs so some advice would be appreciated

Also not run KXStudio before but I have been using Ubuntu Studio pretty much exclusively for about the last two years and tinkered with a few other bits previously and felt it was tie for a change. Always had you repos enabled and it's been a long time since I tried KDE so thought I'd give it a go

EDIT: This site[2] goes into things fairly well specifically for Ubuntu 14.04 and variants so should be perfect for KXStudio. Written a little bit like it's for idiots though but still some good info...

[1] http://www.howtogeek.com/62761/how-to-t ... rformance/
[2] https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/ssd

[glowrak guy]

swap and cache have a longstanding working agreement,
and based on the wisdom of the kernel devs, I would choose the benefits of that,
over hypothetical reduced longevity.

I kept 10% of my ssd unnallocated, so the ssd supposedly uses
that as it's work area, instead of processing within system space.
With 16 gig ram, I doubt you'd hit a swap hard enough to matter,
unless on a massive project using gigantic pro samples, where you'd
just by a 64 gig ram setup, and a new ssd every 5 years would be a non-issue.

if you put linux ssd noatime in google, you'll get articles at the top
for mint, debian, and arch ssd optimization.

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions ... still-free

I do have noatime in fstab, and my little ssd has chugged along nicely
for years. The failure rate of well configured modern ssds is no more a problem
than the click of death on spinning drives, which are far more vulnerable to damages
enabled by attempting to defy gravity

You could set up a small external spinning drive OS,
and do all your web-browsing from there, to save some r/w cycles...

Cheers

[bazsound]

Been wondering about this myself as im building a new computer and going to be using an SSD.

My current system only has 4gb of ram.

My swap never gets used. its always sitting at 0.

Ive never seen it used. same system in windows uses the swap regularly.

My old HD is currently undergoing to slow steady click of death. its over 6 years old. it still works but now and then will go through horrible cycles of clicking. thinking oh that is it finally dying and then on it continues.

[kazakore]

Thanks guys, I think I'll take a combination from the two links I posted above and put exactly the steps I went for in here if I remember...

I also only have 4GB of TRAM currently and although I have seen Swap used with a Swappiness setting of 10 it has been only very rarely. I think with the RAM upgrade I could easily put internet cache onto RAM with 16GB (I think Firefox may have been the main culprit in the past anyway...) With less RAM I guess just reduce its size right down.

I didn't know space you left unallocated would be used to replace dead sectors, I thought they had an inbuilt extra over reported size. Was planning to leave a few percent at least, a few times Swap size or something at least. More if the drive will use it automatically

[thetotalchaos]

Sure you can use a linux OS without SSD, with (almost) no issues. But also you can add the 'discard' option to swap partitions, which looks like a pretty reasonable workaround. You can add it in /etc/fstab or manually

Code: Select all

swapon --discard /dev/sdX 

As if you look for more up-to-date SSD on Linux manual, without the extra FUD and Mythology, just look in the Arch Wiki
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Solid_State_Drives

Cheers, Totalchaos

[kazakore]

As pretty much always some good information on the Arch Linux Wiki page, thanks you. Think after reading that and the related Wikipedia articles I will go with Noop over Deadline for I/O Scheduling. Often a little wary of taking too much from Arch Wiki pages, as although they are often good information and well written Arch is very much bleeding edge, so for example had systemd while Ubuntu and many others were still on init (especially if you only look at LTS versions) and similar kind of issues! Always good for read and getting a bit of extra overview though

Plus I do plan to try and get a stable Arch install as a secondary install on my laptop. But primarily going to go for getting KXStudio up and running first

[thetotalchaos]

I agree that Arch Wiki aims to educate, rather to encourage mindless copy-paste method. The wiki is much more relevant if you are using Debian, newer than oldstable, because nowadays Debian default on systemd as well. As for the discard option for the swap partition, it also is a relatively new option, and systems with older Linux Kernels might not support it. So if you are using something old and dusty you probably should check it manually, before rooting everything into oblivion. It was successfully tested and used on Ubuntu-14.04-lts though.

[kazakore]

Well the new RAM and SSD are install and I have quickly put KXStudio on it. Not sure I will stay with this from a first impressions though. I guessing there are problems at the moments with the repos or something?? First thing I did after installing is to run apt-get update and upgrade, which seemed to complete successfully. Then there was still an announcement bubble telling me there are updates through the update manager, which I try to run but fail, Trying to install a simple text editor like geany or leafpad is failing with unmet dependencies of kxstudio-meta-audio-plugins and to run a apt-get install -f which then also fails after saying it's going to install dpf-plugins. Clearly these plugins have nothing to do with the text editors I'm trying to install through!! Strange as sure I installed a couple of little bits earlier that I knew I used instantly so hopefully just a brief server glitch there...

But then I have found my Data partition is being mounted as read only when mounted (just recursively had to change permissions so hopefully that takes but I shouldn't have to do this and if I do for other connected devices it's basically useless!!)

Try and open Audacious to play a file and it comes up with error ALSA Error: No suitable mixer found. / ALSA error: snd_mixer_find_selem failred. Audio from the onboard sound chip has always just worked before and I would expect it to really! I can see that it is picked in by ALSA in alsamixer and it gets listed (with a lot of loopback devices than I remember before it) in aplay -l as expected. Sure I could learn about asoundrc just to get any audio out of the machine at all but really I shouldn't have to should I?!?

Still I'll work through the niggles and give it a couple of weeks before I decide whether to try another flavour (thinking Jam maybe if this isn't for me... )