Beefing up pop
pop, my parents' computer, is a Pentium I @ 133Mhz. It was running Windows 98 since ages
Since I haven't installed that system on my own machine since about four years or so, I was getting more and more problems in supporting them. I had suggested a few weeks ago they try out GNU/Linux, but they seemed afraid of that. And being stubborn and persistent is unfortunately a family trait, so I couldn't convince them, even if they are already using Thunderbird for mail and OpenOffice.org for office under Windows.
Luckily, Windows itself came to the rescue. Something's gone awry with kernel32.dll, and it doesn't boot anymore. Since the darn thing a) contains a mass of software they regularly use, and b) is frigging slow, I wasn't too happy to reinstall the box. So, I rebooted the thing to GNU/Linux, configured Gnome, and Thunderbird the way they were used from Windows, and let them use that "until I find the time to reinstall Windows". That might take longer than expected, but if they're really not happy with GNU/Linux, I will reinstall Windows. I still have to be able to live with them. For the time being.
Anyway, the kernel32.dll happened a few days ago, so today dad told me the system was running too slow to their liking. Considering the fact that Gnome 2.6 isn't exactly meant for systems running at 133Mhz, this isn't really surprising, and I should've known better than to hand them a default Gnome desktop. This needed fixing.
So, what can a guy do?
Quite a few things, apparently.
- The Gnome system administrator's guide, which is available through a certain specific website I was pointed to a few weeks ago contains a nice chapter 9, which helps to disable those settings in Gnome that eat the most resources. But that, of course, isn't enough.
- Since one of the complaints was that the system took so awfully long to boot, I tricked it into appearing faster. cd /etc/rc2.d; mv S99gdm S19gdm; mv S99rmnologin S19rmnologin can do wonders.
- While doing that, I discovered that there were a huge number of useless packages installed on pop. Which isn't surprising; I originally installed GNU/Linux on this machine when potato had just been released. That's ages ago. In the mean time, it has been upgraded, upgraded, extra software installed, some software removed, and was hardly used. Thank God for debfoster. I ran debfoster -n, and threw about 800M worth of software off the system. That included things that were useless on this hardware but do run a daemon, such as the sensord package. Helpful.
- After all this, i ran top and had a look at the result. The system ran considerably faster, but there was still room for improvement. One thing I noticed was that with no software running except for Gnome, gnome-terminal and top, it had actually more swap space in use than I had physical memory. That couldn't be a good idea. So, I thought about the things I could do about that; and this reminded me to the fact that the migration of services from folk to western I had been doing had almost been completed; and that folk,a 100Mhz Pentium, requires the same type of RAM as pop. Back before I had western, folk was everything and the kitchensink in my network – NFS- and Samba-fileserver, Windows PDC, mailserver (exim4, courier-imap, and IMP), router, firewall, LDAP; it did backups, updated the F-Prot virus data files on other systems, and did DHCP and DNS. So it required quite a bit of memory to keep all that going smoothly. Since, however, most of those services have now been taken over by western (with the exception of the router/firewall, DHCP, and backup stuff, all are migrated), it doesn't need as much RAM anymore. So, I removed two 32M SIMMs from folk—now running on 16MB of RAM—and added them to the 96M already in pop, to end up at 160M of RAM.
That should do it. I hope. I switched it on again, but didn't wait for it, as it was late enough already and I really had to go to work now.
While typing this on the train, however, mom called me on my cellphone that pop didn't boot properly. It was waiting for folk; apparently there's still an NFS mount configured, but it's not working for some reason. Meaning, it takes over five minutes to get past that stage.
Grmbl.