Help Shed Some Light

[JWWargo]

I spent a good deal of time searching the forums for answers, and while I learned a great deal I still have a couple questions.


1. I have an older 4gb sd card I want to use for swap. I followed the instructions here: http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/54394-guide-using-a-usb-thumb-drive-as-swap/page__gopid__875241&#entry875241 and after completing step 6 I check to see if it's active and the results don't list anything. Do I have to do something different because it's an SD card and not a USB flash drive? (Is it even necessary to have 4gb of swap memory? Am I better off partitioning a smaller amount?)


2. Is it okay to delete files off the NAND if you never plan to use them? Such as the Midori and Arora web browsers, default image viewer and document viewers? Are they tied to the OS?

 

[MarioPandio]

Not sure about the steps you've followed as its quite likely that applies purely to using USB flash as a swap rather than SD card.


In general its been advised that a swap file or partition of just 512mb (double the NAND) would be the best choice and if you have a reasonable capacity SD card around, coupled with your wish to delete NAND based apps, I'd advise you boot from SD card by using Dave1234's Sd card Installer PND that you'll find in the Beta testing section. You can use that to create a swap file partition, an SD install of either HF4 or HF5 OS and a large FAT32 partition for housing the Pandora folders for PND's and other media simultaneously. If you leave plenty of space for the Ext3 OS partition (900mb by default, 700mb needed for Dev tools if desired and more to spare for opkg installs) then you'll have no worries about space constraints on the NAND.


Deleting Midori and Arora are upto you but Arora is currently the default tool for opening the documentation provided with PND files via menu>documentation>relevantPNDname or in minimenu by pressing Y whilst an app is highlighted. Blueprotoman has provided a guide to switching this over to midori instead and in theory you could get other browsers to open PND documentation by a similar process, if you do decide to remove them.


For ease though, and giving you the NAND OS install to fall back upon incase you break anything in the process of removing those apps, I would again advise that you create an SD card installation to booth from first and try the removal out in that environment first.


Sorry for the wall of waffle

 

[JWWargo]

Thanks for the help, MarioPandio. I'm going to try out the SD installer app tomorrow. But I do worry that the speed of the card would effect performance. Would I notice any lagging if I was running apps from a different card than the one with OS installed on it?

 

[MarioPandio]

I cant say I've noticed any drop in performance since booting from SD, or apps run from SD2. I'm using class 6 and 10 cards but the class 10 will be limited to class 6 anyway by the Pandora's SD slots specifications IIRC.


Its a very easy app to use that Dave1234 has created and obviously if you don't like the result just return to the NAND setup instead.


The only bugbear I've encountered is that Hotkeys' for applications don't always seem to work on some boots, which is something that doesn't occur with NAND installation. There's probably a reason/fix somewhere but I've yet to ask about.

 

[Prometheus]

The only bugbear I've encountered is that Hotkeys' for applications don't always seem to work on some boots, which is something that doesn't occur with NAND installation. There's probably a reason/fix somewhere but I've yet to ask about.

Actually, it can, and does, occur with NAND installations too. I seem to recall that it's a bug in that version of Xfce, so I don't think that there's anything that we can do about it for the moment.