Devuan 5 not Booting on 2005 Toshiba Tecra A7 Intel Centrino Duo

greenjeans · 2024-12-17 16:08:17

Is there a technical/speed advantage or disadvantage to having SWAP at the end of the drive?
Does having SWAP at the end make it easier to reconfigure the other partitions when necessary?

1. No speed advantage that i'm aware of, I don't even know how you'd measure that.
2. Depends on what you mean by "reconfigure" I guess. As long as i've been with linux that's just always the way it's been done, i've always assumed there were good reasons for that, perhaps somebody more knowledgeable can say why.

I agree every firmly with Kapqa's post (#50), on older machines burning to a CD or DVD is pretty much bullet-proof and works for me every time, plus after burning I now have a hard copy of the .iso that will last forever unless it gets scratched up too bad or set on fire.

I have old distros and projects of mine on CD going back to 2009, every now and then I boot one up just for fun and look at what I did back then.

All that being said, running a distro off a stick is fun, and frequently in my experience runs faster usually than really old hard drives, I have run old machines for months on either a stick or a CD (Puppy Linux back when it was actually small).

Mintstick works really well if you just want a pure liveUSB and nothing else, it's in the repo. For all other chores i'm sticking with Refracta2usb, it seem complex at first, but after you've used it a few times you really begin to appreciate it's versatility.

chris2be8 · 2024-12-17 17:20:48

Swap placement will have no effect on performance on a SSD.

On spinning rust it will only have any effect if you are actually using swap space. Seeking from 1 cylinder to another takes longer if they are further apart, so having swap space near to the data files you are accessing at the same time will be slightly faster. But if you are using swap space that often your performance will feel very slow.

I learnt a lot about tuning disks and swap space when I was a MVS systems programmer (back then 64Mb was a big system). Nowadays I'd prefer to just buy more RAM (after checking for software with a memory leak).

greenjeans · 2024-12-17 17:32:51

^^ Yep.

In practice the only few times swap has ever been used on my machines, was because something went very wrong with some particular program and it went wild chewing up all the ram. Usually this was my fault, messing about trying experimental stuff and not having a plethora of ram to start with.

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#51 2024-12-17 16:08:17

Re: Devuan 5 not Booting on 2005 Toshiba Tecra A7 Intel Centrino Duo

#52 2024-12-17 17:20:48

Re: Devuan 5 not Booting on 2005 Toshiba Tecra A7 Intel Centrino Duo

#53 2024-12-17 17:32:51

Re: Devuan 5 not Booting on 2005 Toshiba Tecra A7 Intel Centrino Duo

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