Questions about setting up a new computer

[Joel Roth]

Hi John,

What is your need for a RAM disk?  With the advent of solid
state drives (SSD) access to files is much faster, so there
is less need for RAM disk. Also, I believe linux will cache
disk files in RAM. 

I recall hearing linux behaves better with a swap file, even if it is 
used very little. 

cheers,

Joel

John J. Boyer wrote:
> I've more or less decided to replacer my ten-year-old Linux machine. It 
> is giving error messages intermittently. Most of them are about sector 
> errors, but others seem to have nothing to do with the hard drive. It 
> may be more and more troublesome, even if the hard drive is replaced. 
> Besides, it would be nice to get more up-to-date hardware.
> 
> I'm thinking of getting 32 GB of ram. 8 GB will be for normal use. The 
> other 24 GB will be in a ramdisk. Do I need a paging file? 8 GB of 
> available ram should be more than enough. The paging file on my present 
> machine always shows 0 usage, even with only 4 GB of ram. How do I avoid 
> setting up a paging file during installation? I'm using Debian Jessie.
> 
> How do i set up the ramdisk? I want to assign the temp directory to it. 
> It might be nice if the bin, sbin and usr directories were loaded onto 
> it at boot-up.
> 
> Thanks,
> John
> 
> -- 
> John J. Boyer; President,
> AbilitiesSoft, Inc.
> Email: john.boyer at abilitiessoft.org
> Website: http://www.abilitiessoft.org
> Status: 501(C)(3) Nonprofit
> Location: Madison, Wisconsin USA
> Mission: To develop softwares and provide STEM services for people with 
>          disabilities which are available at no cost.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-list at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list

-- 
Joel Roth