Hello everybody, I've had my linux netbook for 2 days now and like it, its got a 16gb ssd in it and I'd like to turn off the virtual memory so it wont ruin the drive, does anybody know how to go about doing this as I'm finding linux near impossible to control. Window's is pure luxury in comparison. Daz
Don't delete the swap partition! You need either to rebuild the kernel and set it not to use swap, which may or may not be beyond your skill, or a little googling says you su - or sudo "swapoff -a". That's not a permanent switch off, just until you next reboot, so you'd have to put that in your system startup scripts somewhere!
Far Beyond my capabilities??? Your not wrong there!!!finding this linux thing incredibly tricky but sort of quite enjoyable too. I'll google it and see what I can find.
To be honest you'd be better leaving it, Linux only uses the swap when it is completely out of main memory. If that happens with out a swap it'll likely crash at least the programme looking for more space. Post the output of free -m when your using the machine as you normally would we'll see if its using it or if its likely too. I've a little desktop with out a hard disk and only 512mb of ram and its never ran out of memory doing normal netbook type tasks.
Virt mem Yeah I was thinking that, I did the Ctrl+Alt+Del the day I got it and it was only using about 300meg (contains 1 gig) but although I cant be certain I think it was doing something with the page file. I'll keep an eye on it. I tell you what tho, I get more help from this forum than the official Acer Aspire One. Its not worth a carrot that one. Thanks for the replys everyone. Daz
If you install Conky (it's probably in the repositories) you can keep a constant eye on it with just, ehm, looking at your screen basically. Just use the swap and/or swapmax, swapperc, swapbar variables.
To be honest with you, I'm thinking of upgrading to XP because having to read through tons and tons of forums just to move a desktop icon or installing a piece of software is really starting to bug me. there's no real guides on how to do stuff saying that I do like the fact you dont need anti virus and firewall's. Imperium, you said install Conky, where are the repositories and then how do I install it?
I can understand the frustration (it kept me away from GNU/Linux for years when I was younger), but that's what happens when you get a new OS. The learning curve is there but in my opinion worth it. I don't know where the repositories for Fedora are, I have never used it. But if you have Gnome as a desktop environment you should have Synaptic (sometimes called "Add or Remove software" or something a like, depending on the distribution) installed. Check under your System/Administration menu. KDE has got its own application, I think. A (very) quick Google seems to tell me Fedora uses yum. Try sudo yum install conky in a terminal. (Unofficial Fedora FAQ). There's this .rpm, but it's built for Mandriva and I have no idea how well RPM files work across different distributions. One of the downsides of free software to new users is that any distribution can change any code, so yeah. Else you can build it from the source files from Conky's Sourceforge page. It's not that hard
Imperium, I was copying 2 folders with data in them (6gb) and during it the screen went funny (it crashed) and so as I couldnt see what was happening I took the pen drive out, the folder it had copied I tried to delete because I wasnt sure what was in them and for some reason I cant move/delete them, I tried to shift+del also but still nothing, is there anyway of removing these files from my system, other than these my system is pucka, always seems to be something going wrong with linpus. Daz
Hm. It may be the drinks I've been having, but this sounds a bit confusing. I'll try (emoticon with beret because I live in France). Try to delete the folders as root. In a terminal, type "sudo rm -r <folder path>". The "-r" flag means "recursive", i.e. it will allow you to delete directories. If it gives you any crap other than "<path> is a directory, do you really want to delete it?" add "-f" [means force, i.e. no confirmation - be careful!]: "sudo rm -rf <folder path>". Be very, very careful though. rm -rf as root will delete anything you point it to, so double-check that your path is correct. If you prefer to do it in a GUI, normally this should work: in a terminal, type "sudo nautilus" and navigate to the folder you want to get rid of, then delete/shift-delete it. Nautilus is Gnome's file manager, so if you've got KDE installed it will be Konquerer (if I remember correctly). Any other DE will have its own preferred file manager like Thunar or PCMan, so it'll depend on what you're running (which you should know ). As for the crashing: when your X session crashes, try CTRL+ALT+F1. This should take you out of X and into a tty (black and white screen). Standard GNU/Linux distributions come with six TTYs - allowing you to log in to each one separately. If X crashes, hit CTRL+ALT+F1 (or CTRL+ALT+Backspace [which kills/restarts X], or the newer command which is something like CTRL+ALT+PrtScr+K - Google that one to be sure ) and look at the output. There should be some kind of error message which you can Google to find a solution (if any).
after trying this ( a few times because I got it wrong) Ive got the reply rm: cannot remove '/mnt/home/Documents/MCDST' : No such file or directory rm: cannot remove 'd2/K-Alliance' : No such file or directory using the GUI the folder is in My Disk:///Documents and the folder is called MCDST d2 I'm completely lost with all this. thanks for trying to help me though. when I try to delete the folder using the GUI this is what I get:- Failed to copy "/mnt/home/Documents/MCDST d2/K-Alliance Supporting the Windows Vista Operating System & Applications/Courses/Supporting the Microsoft Windows Vista Operating System and Applications/5119_2_03.flv" to "trash:///0-MCDST%20d2$5/K-Alliance%20Supporting%20the%20Windows%20Vista%20Operating%20System%20&%20Applications/Courses/Supporting%20the%20Microsoft%20Windows%20Vista%20Operating%20System%20and%20Applications/5119_2_03.flv". Failed to copy "/mnt/home/Documents/MCDST d2/K-Alliance Supporting the Windows Vista Operating System & Applications/Courses/Supporting the Microsoft Windows Vista Operating System and Applications/5119_2_03.flv" to "trash:///0-MCDST%20d2$5/K-Alliance%20Supporting%20the%20Windows%20Vista%20Operating%20System%20&%20Applications/Courses/Supporting%20the%20Microsoft%20Windows%20Vista%20Operating%20System%20and%20Applications/5119_2_03.flv". Also when I tried to use the sudo nautilus command it was an unknown command.
From the location of the folder (/mnt and My Disk:// I think the folder is on an external medium like a portable hard drive? If you can't reach it, it's either not plugged in or not mounted. If it's on an MS Windows partition, you may need to mount that first, too. To mount an external hard drive (or MS Windows partition), type mount -t <filesystem> <location of drive> as superuser/root. If sudo doesn't work, type su in the terminal to become root temporarily. <filesystem> depends on the filesystem the drive is using. If it's FAT32, you'd type vfat. The man page for mount (man mount) lists the supported filesystems. Often, the mount command can automatically detect the filesystem, so it's worth trying without -t <filesystem> the first time so you don't have to look up the filesystem and its abbreviation. <location of drive> can be tricky. In general, it should be /dev/sda. The first partition (or only partition) would be /dev/sda1, which you'd need to mount. To find out the location of the drive, type df in a terminal when the drive is plugged in. As for sudo nautilus, if it's sudo that is an unknown command, type su to become root temporarily (exit to stop being root). If nautilus is the unknown command, you need to replace it with the file manager your desktop environment's using. If you're using KDE, it should be Konquerer. Sorry I can't be any more help. Good luck!
Initially it was on a pen drive, but as I was copying it over the machine crashed. I had deleted the files from the pen drive as I was trying to install XP onto it. so I replaced the files on the pen drive and reinserted it, tried to delete the files from my acer but still no luck. The files are currentl stored on the internal sdd. However, one of them is a txt doc which works, and the others are .flv and.chm, if I can get them to work it wont matter if I cant delete them. If I was to try to overwrite them would that work? no, cant seem to do anything with them. I'm gonna have a go at the link underneath. fingers crossed
Code: sudo rm -f filetoremove basically forces the files to be removed. Please be very careful with this command as it will permanently delete any file you point it at
I just typed into the terminal sudo rm -f /mnt/home/Documents/MCDST d2 and all it did was go to the next line? no reports came up or anything.
Yup it doesn't tell you any thing it just deletes the file. If you type ls you'll get a list of the files in the directory it should be gone.
Could it be that the files are still in /mnt without the pendrive inserted; i.e. the system thinks the files are there but in reality they aren't? I've never had this happen, but if you rm -f and don't get an error message, the file is gone. With the crash during copying, maybe the folder in /mnt got messed up a little?
I think I'll try and email thunar to see if they can shed any light on the subject. its baffling. when I go to my files the documents folder is in My Disk:/// but when i try to send it to trash its /mnt/. when i took the drive out it mustnt have completed what it was trying to do.
