[Sugar-devel] Sugar-devel Digest, Vol 11, Issue 89 (SoaS performance/hard drive swapping)

[Jim Simmons]

Art,

Sugar on the XO does not have a swap partition because swapping to
disk would quickly wear out the solid state drive.  You'd have the
same problem on a thumb drive, plus swapping to a drive connected to a
USB 1.0 port would not be fast.  Now the other idea of checking to see
if the computer has any Linux swap partitions on its hard drives and
mounting them sounds good.  Lots of Live CDs will mount any files
systems they find on the computer so I would guess you could do the
same thing with SoaS.  You could put a swap partition on an old
Windows PC using the gnuparted live CD, without actually installing
Linux.  Windows users wouldn't even know it was there, but SoaS could
find it and use it.

As for supporting more hardware, a full Linux distro installs drivers
once as part of the install process.  A live CD or thumb drive has to
figure out what kind of hardware you have as part of the boot process.
 That has to limit what hardware you can reasonably support.

The other thing you can do with a full distro is give each user his
own account with a password.  In Fedora 11 when you login you can
specify what desktop environment you want (GNOME, KDE, WindowMaker,
Sugar).  So every user of the computer has his own stuff, even if he
can't always take it home with him.

James Simmons



> 2) Would it be possible to configure a SoaS USB drive so that the unused
> portion could function as a swap drive?
>
> Art Hunkins