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Comment Stop enabling swap (Score 2) 99

it also seems to do well with low-memory systems (lots of the current models have just 2GB, which brings many Linux distros to a disk-swapping crawl), and starts up nicely quick.

I am in the midst of building a CarPC right now, as parts trickle in from far-flung regions of the globe, which is to say mostly HK. I'm saving my money for the display so it's a budget build based on a Boxer DA078L motherboard. I downgraded the processor to IIRC a X2 3800+ from a 3900+ because the specific processor model I ordered had almost 30W lower TDP, bringing the total system TDP down well under 100W which meant I could use a PicoPSU 120. I haven't tested my el cheapo 300W (headroom! which I will leave unused) boost-buck regulator yet, that's next. It has 2GB of RAM and I installed Kodibuntu, then installed navit. It comes with chromium and I am running the system on an 8GB CF card, currently in a USB adapter and soon in a SATA adapter. Maybe someday I'll buy it a real SSD but again, this is just a pocket change build based on something I had already. A $8 low-profile AM2/3 cooler is coming.

Why care? I can run Kodi and navit at the same time with no problems, using compiz as my window manager. and it can easily run chromium under LXDE. And I have no swap whatsoever. It would be dog-slow on my CF card (It's a "133X" Transcend, whatever that means) and I don't want to beat up my flash device anyway.

2GB is a lot of RAM. It seems like it isn't because of all the crap we run these days. But 2GB will actually go hilariously far if you use a limited desktop environment, or in fact none at all. If you just put the smallest Linux you can come up with (puppy?) into a partition with chromium, make init keep X running and make X keep chromium running, you'll have what you're looking for. I presume the only reason to want this is to have it as a multiboot option, since as others have said, if you wanted an actual chromebook you would have bought one. To come back around to my long introductory paragraph, I installed Kodibuntu when I wanted automotive navigation. That seems dumb, but it makes sense in the view of trying not to buy stuff. I also wanted more CPU power and didn't care about GPU power, so it made sense to me not to buy a Pi 2 and use a turnkey solution. (That's where I got the pointer to the skin I'm using.)

Comment Re:disable swap (Score 2) 99

As you said, swap isn't needed so much, but there are still good reasons to have some around.

There's only one: you have very little RAM. Then you may well need to use some swap to get a modern browser running well enough to hit newegg or eBay and buy some RAM.

Besides the usual graceful degradation argument

No. Swap causes graceless degradation. It's not so bad if you have SSD or hybrid disk, because it can handle seeking all over hell when it happens. But it's better to just let the OOM killer murder the out-of-control application. Save early, save often.

it can be particularly handy for portables as a suspend partition.

There's nothing wrong with a suspend file. You could make the argument that it's possible to fill up the disk to the point where there's no room for one, but that's a feature. The computer can inform me that it cannot suspend, and let me know why. I can then decide what to do about it.

Swap was awesome back when RAM was expensive. RAM is now really cheap and you can do a hilariously huge amount of stuff with just a couple gigabytes of it and no swap. With four gigabytes of it I can run my database, map, and pbx servers in their own full-fledged VMs on top of a machine already providing other services... and still have room left over to run a Windows XP VM for automotive manuals. Now swap is just stupid, unless you know you have a specific use case where it won't unacceptably degrade performance. And frankly, if it helps you, it's probably because someone allocated a lot of memory they weren't using.

Comment Re:Like multiplayer? (Score 1) 104

I think uPnP is cool. Obviously, so do malware authors, but I still think it's cool — if you do gaming on windows. And that's where most of the action is... It'd probably be wise to turn it off when not using it, though. I never save firewall rules automagically, so it would be easy to fire the firewall script when terminating it and know that something sensible would happen.

Comment Re:Mainframe era? (Score 3, Interesting) 46

Uh, it's nearly as much CPU power (141 cores at 5.2GHz, but even more CISC that x86) as the current mainframe, zSeries hasn't been about brute CPU in decades, it's about balanced CPU and I/O combined with high QoS and absolute stability. As an example the Z13 has nearly 1GB of L4 cache in the I/O coprocessors.

Comment Re:Measurements (Score 1) 425

So which one is a "software development engineer"?

That depends on the country, and whether engineer means anything there.

Banging out code is the core of it, to be sure, but it's not what most of us spend our time doing, unless you throw in "design" and "testing" into "programming" - which is fine, but then we're back into people skills being part of it.

Right, but we've all worked for places that had people who made other people want to leave, but that you couldn't fire because they were indispensable because of their brilliance. It's not a good plan, but it is a common one.

Comment Re:2-Butoxyethanol (Score 1) 328

And all it would take would be a home mechanic spilling a bottle of one of those products to get to that same parts-per-trillion levels in their own well water.

It would take a lot more than that, in all likelihood. It's usually not trivial for something you spill to wind up in your well unless you've got an open well, and you spill into it.

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