[ltp] Re: 1GB in 1-slot T30 -- no bootie [SOLVED]

[Thomas Hood]

I found a solution to the no-boot problem.  I added this line to the stanza
in the grub configuration file that configures grub to boot my OS:

    uppermem 524288

I arbitrarily chose that number of kilobytes on the speculation that the T30
_really is_ limited to 1 GiB total and thus 512 MiB per slot.  Probably
other values would work.  Anyway, with that line in place Linux does boot.
Linux sees the whole 1 GiB of memory (so there is no reason for me to change
the argument to the uppermem command).

Now some comments about bloat.

When my second memory slot ceased to work and my memory dropped from 512 MiB
to 256 MiB what I noticed was that my computer became very slow when running
more than one office application.  Investigating, I started top and looked
at the virtual memory usage.  Firefox and thunderbird were each using close
to 200 MiB of memory!  Switching back and forth caused considerable disk
access.   Starting OpenOffice.org on top of these two caused the machine to
slow down to thrashing crawl.

I think it's a bit outrageous that these applications are using so much memory.
It's not that long ago that I was running similar applications with no
swapping in 128 MiB.

I switched to opera from firefox for regular browser use and that helped.
Anyone have any suggestions for a less bloated MUA than Thunderbird but
with comparable functionality?

Anyway, I am now at 1 GiB and hopefully that will suffice for a year or two.
-- 
Thomas Hood