Thinkpads Forum

Hi all,

I just bought a factory re-furbed T23 (which I won't receive until Thursday) with the intention of wiping the HDD and installing Ubuntu. I am not interested in dual-booting Windows 2K and Ubuntu, as I am sort of anti-windows, so I just want to get Windows off of the machine as quickly as I can (if I never even see it boot that will be fine with me). I have never migrated from one OS to another before, only upgraded the same OS. So my question is; Since the T23 only has 256 MB of SDRAM right now (or so the vendor said), and I want to upgrade to 512 MB minimum or 1 GB if I can afford it, should I install the RAM before I wipe the drive and install Linux? Or does it matter?

I searched the forum for similar questions, but nothing jumped out at me.

TIA for your advice.

Kent

It doesn't really matter whether you install the RAM before or after you image Linux onto your new T23.

... and Linux is not memory-hungry. You may be just fine with 256 MB. I'm running XFCE on my desktop running Gentoo, memory usage is below 40 MB with GUI loaded. 1 GB is probably waste of good money (and unnecessary power consumption + heat). You better leave it as it is for now, monitor memory usage and add if necessary.

Well, it doesn't take up a significant amount *more* of power you know. You can skin down Ubuntu to such a point where it will be happy with as much memory as you have that ships with the T23 already. Although, 1GB is nice simply because of the extra breathing room you get with it (plus, think of XGL/Compiz! )

Thanks for the replies.

I'll take your advice then and leave the machine alone until I get the OS installed and all of the kinks worked out, and get all of the apt_get and config. stuff I'm sure I'll need to do out of the way. Then I'll see how power-hungry the thing is.

Thanks again,

KC

True, 512mb ram is enough for ubuntu, but i`m also thinking about upragde it to 1gb, just for fun i guess.

@Carbonfish

Here's the recipe for you (256 MB):

After you have Ubuntu installed and do your everyday job keep an eye on swap size. If it is mostly under 5 MB then you wont gain any performance increase by adding RAM. If it's often more than 10 MB then adding RAM is recommended. If it keeps growing over 50 MB then lack of RAM is a serious bottleneck for you.
But, things are a little different for laptops.
First, one more RAM module in your laptop won't draw significant power, that's true. However, when running on battery even 5 watts makes some difference. OTOH, with a laptop you may want the HDD to spin down to save battery even more. With 2.6 kernels you can adjust the swappiness sysctl (which is 60 by default). Once you are sure you have enough RAM set the wm.swappiness to 20 or 15. With such a low value kernel will rather flush buffers than swap (and spin up the HDD).
To adjust swappiness add following to your startup scripts:
sysctl -w vm.swappiness=15
Or, if your distro has /etc/sysctl.conf, add a line there:
vm.swappiness = 15

Happy tuning!

dummkopf,

Thanks for the tune-up tips. I can't wait to get the TP and get started.

KC