On Wed, 06 Apr 2022 02:50:01 +0200, Charles Curley <charlescur...@charlescurley.com> wrote:
>On Tue, 05 Apr 2022 13:09:57 -0400 >Noah Sombrero <fed...@fea.st> wrote: > >> Finally, there is a caviat to all this. Laptops many times take a >> piece of motherboard ram for video ram, and larger resolutions take >> more video ram. That while debian appears to take another piece of >> ram for itself in a ramdisk. > >Two thoughts here. > >* As far as I know, the only RAM disk Debian uses routinely is the > initial ram disk, or initrd. Mine tend to run about 48 MB, although I > believe that is compressed. So that shouldn't be that big of a factor. > >* I believe that by the time Linux is ready to launch anything using a > GUI other than the initial frame buffer it is done with and has > discarded the initrd. Ok. >* Can you limit the amount of RAM used for video in the BIOS? Cannot. I see that this old p4 cpu can be split into 2 logical cpu's. Would this be an advantage? It is enabled. >> This laptop originally came with 500mb ram and that was fine with win >> xp. It now has 1.25 gb, and it is not enough for 1440x900 video and >> debian. Parts of the display start flashing as video and program >> usage start moving things around. And then debian dies. I was able >> to get it back using restore boot. > >Odd. The OS should not be stepping on the video memory. Or vice versa. Everything is ok until I load a program of any size, pan, kmail, thunderbird, worker file manager. Worker immediately freezes up debian. This was not true at 1024x768. >> >> Yes, I have another gb of ram on the way. I hope that will be >> sufficient. > >You will likely find it useful anyway. Good luck. -- Noah Sombrero
