Re: [DISCUSS] SDCard Swap Partition Methods..
 

just this thread? these 3pages. i read it. but dint get nythn from it :(

Re: [DISCUSS] SDCard Swap Partition Methods..
 

Then, fallback to plan B, as everything You need to know was here (in fact, even in few first posts, another ones are just to make it easier for end-user).

No irony here again - it's just that lack of understanding basic concepts could bring great harm to Your device. Methods described here consists of editing rcS-late (critical file for booting system) or putting script in event.d (scripts executed at boot time) - doing both without any idea of what You're doing could make Your system unbootable.

/Estel

Re: [DISCUSS] SDCard Swap Partition Methods..
 

i saw the posts, the links to use sd card as swap. but cant use it. dunno. would have been easier for me and most noobs like me if u could tell me a step by step guide. bt yes, i cant even expect this much from you. you are a senior member of this forum. surely u will get annoyed because these are simple things for you. bt still. taking a chance to make my N900 fast,responsive.

Re: [DISCUSS] SDCard Swap Partition Methods..
 

i saw the posts, the links to use sd card as swap. but cant use it. dunno. would have been easier for me and most noobs like me if u could tell me a step by step guide. bt yes, i cant even expect this much from you. you are a senior member of this forum. surely u will get annoyed because these are simple things for you. bt still. taking a chance to make my N900 fast,responsive.

Re: [DISCUSS] SDCard Swap Partition Methods..
 

You must understand that writing a step by step guide to someone with knowledge level as you have might take 3 pages long (no offense), and don't forget that everything is evolving and changing, so documentation might never end.

By writing such step by step guide to every issue, the community will make a much slower progress. time wasted about documentation needs to be limited, since it hurts progress with open and new issues that are found all the time.

I don't see myself at a high level with mameo, but still i am willing to learn and i have spent many hours to fill gaps of things i did not understand.

I think you are trying to jump to deep water without the will to learn to swim from your own reasons and that is fine, but with that being the case, i think that this device might not be the best choice for you.

By starting to learn from the bottom, asking questions that will prove that you are learning and evolving, i believe you will find people in these forums much more helpful - as i have found, so understand that the responses you get are not coming from a bad place.

Re: [DISCUSS] SDCard Swap Partition Methods..
 

The thing is, noobs shouldn't touch that settings. Not becaue it makes "senior members" (or just "more linux-clever ones) annoyed, but because if you don't know what you're doing, you may (almost) brick your device. This is not like on Android phones, this is Linux phone which is more open - that has positive aspects, but also negative sides. By negative I mean that when you take any two N900s in your hands, you may have totally different root filesystems on them and they may react in totally different way to your actions (editing critical system files). You need this very basic knowledge not to totally mess up your device... I understand this may be a bit of rocket science at first for someone who is not IT-related-guy, but you just SHOULD know that to use this device, sorry... you know how to do basic things on your Windows PC (/MacOS Mac) and you had to learn how basic stuff works, by the same rule you should learn dos-and-don'ts of Maemo system.

Re: [DISCUSS] SDCard Swap Partition Methods..
 

I agree with others that it's plain unwise to write guides and let noobs alter settings they shouldn't alter. But on the other hand you have to realize: these 'n00b' people here that still ask these questions are the ones trying not to give up on their N900, the rest has moved on.

So, I think it's also a good approach to gather best-practice methods into comprehensible guides and/or packages, that allow the 'regular user' to have a great Maemo experience as well. For example, the script by Impehan looks really promising, and would help me, and a lot of others out, but I'm simply not able to implement this right now. Converting this into a package ('app' in regular-user words) would involve no risk for the regular user, and help out, right?

Now, back to the Swap-to-microSD thing: am I right that an 'easy' approach would be to create a file on the micro-SD and use swapset or just swapon to enable the file? The steps would be:
1. create file, name ...
2. use 'swapon ...' to test
3. run [thing] to disable unmounting on removing cover
4. do [thing] to include both measures in bootloop
5. [...]
6. profit!
7. some incredible hero converts this into an app, and gets donations, thanks, and so on

Right? Now, can someone help me fill in the blanks? :D

Re: [DISCUSS] SDCard Swap Partition Methods..
 

I read that over and over again but my N900 doesn't behave that way. When I just open the back cover absolutely nothing happens. The ext2 partition (does the FS matter?) on my sd card is still mounted and useable and I have no problems related to the swap partition on it either. Does this mean my magnetic sensor doesn't work?
I also often read that if you connect a N900 with an sd card to a PC in PC suite mode the card gets unmounted from the N900 and mounted by the PC. But if I connect my N900 to one of my PC's (all of them running Debian, no idea if that matters) the ext2 partition remains mounted on the N900 and I can mount it from the PC. I can then read data simultaneously but writing from either side without manually unmounting the other side in advance results in FS corruption. Anyone?

What exactly are you worried about? I tried it on my N900 but didn't see any changes, neither improvements nor regressions. So I stopped that again. But I have zram running (and actually in use) on my HTPC 24/7 for about a month now and as far as I'm concerned (which of course is not representative) it's stable.

Re: [DISCUSS] SDCard Swap Partition Methods..
 

I am worried about the instant reboots I experience when enabling ramzswap. Happens sometimes, not always, but in a startup script?

Then the easiest solution for newbies is package swapset.
Even nobody will check sources ("dpkg -x *.deb ."), but just install ...

@Bert
already done, see package swapset
(except this does not work for swap files, just partitions)

Re: [DISCUSS] SDCard Swap Partition Methods..
 

@Estel and others
How do you refresh your swap?
I made a script which checks the amount of written bytes on mmcblk1p1 (not swap usage) and think that swap defragmentation occurs only after 768MB written. Is that right? Or should I rely on amount of /proc/swap ? But I almost never go over 256MB here.
Or when does swap fragmentation do start?