Are you swapped? Increase the performance of Linux machine.

With the ever increasing cost of the Hardware, the amount of physical RAM available on the system is increasing day by day. For example, couple of years back, I had a system which was very high end Desktop with 256MB RAM and today I have a 2GB RAM Desktop. So, whats the point.

The Linux systems (right word should be kernel) are desiged to use both RAM and swap partition. Swap partition is a partition on Hard disk and is used mostly like RAM. Problem is that HDD access is always slower than RAM access and hence inherently, the system will work little slower even if you have enough RAM not to use swap. The term ”swappiness” is used to determine how the kernel should try to seam-balance between the use of RAM and swap. By default, most of the distro’s have a swappiness of 60. A higher value of swappiness means that the RAM will be swapped out faster.

Logwatch for Linux Systems.

On my personal <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/client" title="Client (computing)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client_%28computing%29">desktop at home, I like to see the <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/statistics" title="Statistics" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics">statistics at least once a day, for what was installed, what was run with <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/sudo" title="Sudo" rel="homepage" href="http://www.sudo.ws/">sudo and other such details like <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/kernel" title="Kernel (computing)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_%28computing%29">kernel errors.

Running this monotonously every day is quite boring, so comes to rescue is logwatch. I have <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/fedora" title="Fedora" rel="homepage" href="http://fedoraproject.org/">Fedora <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/installation" title="Installation (computer programs)" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Installation_%28computer_programs%29">installation so I will talk about the location with respect to that so for your distribution it might be a little different.

Contd:: Evaluation of Distro\’s

<a href="www.foresightlinux.org/" target="_blank">Foresight

Foresight is a desktop operating system featuring an intuitive user interface and a showcase of the latest desktop software, giving users convenient and enjoyable access to their music, photos, videos, documents, and Internet resources.

<a href="http://amit-agarwal.co.in/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/1.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-270" title="Foresight" src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/1-300x225.jpg" alt="Foresight" width="300" height="225" />

I liked their logo. Quite simple and intutive.

<a href="http://amit-agarwal.co.in/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/2.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-271" title="Foresight Foreground" src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/2-300x225.jpg" alt="Foresight Foreground" width="300" height="225" />

Logo goes quite well with the Foreground image. Both are same in color and hence it gives you a feeling of theme and not just ramdomly selected foreground.

Build custom KDE ditro online in minutes with your selection of packages

There&#8217;s a new guy in the block and its called NimbleX. From various sources, I have found that this is quite fast. I am downloading this currently. The main advantage is that the distro is of just 200MB with most of the day to day utilities available in the distro by default.

<img title="Custom Nimble" src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.com/wp-content/uploads//logos/customNXb1.png" alt="Custom Nimble" width="264" height="67" />

And if you think that this is just not for you as you like some package and its missing from NimbleX, no problem. Just go <a href="http://custom.nimblex.net/ " target="_blank">here, and create your own live distro withing minutes with custom package&#8217;s that can be used as Live CD or can be installed on the HDD/USB. Now that&#8217;s generations ahead of Windows or any other OS. What do you say?