synaptic fault

My girlfriend has one of the first netbooks that were launched long ago. It is the Acer Aspire One A110 model that ships with 512MB RAM and an 8 GB SSD disk (an Intel Z-P230). This SSD has been criticized for its slow read and write speed. Intel lists the drive’s maximum speeds as 38 MB/s read and 10 MB/s write. But I can sure that you will not get more than 5MB/s writing.

So imagine, with 512 of RAM and a disc that seems rather an SD card, having any modern operating system running smoothly can be quite painful.

So I decided to give a try to MeeGo on this machine and I liked the user interface and also I was surprised that it is running more smoothly than the previous Ubuntu NBR installation.

This notebook has only 512 RAM so without a swap device you can just open only a little more than the browser and a shell. But trying to put a swap on this disk would be like shooting yourself in the head.

So here is when the great project compcache comes to rescue. Unfortunately the kernel that comes with MeeGo does not include compcache nor is there any package available in the repositories, so if you are looking to enable compcache in MeeGo this is your lucky day.

I have compiled all the necessary bits to run compcache under MeeGo and I packaged it in an rpm file.  This package includes the ramzswap module and the lzo_compress module compiled to match the MeeGo 1.0 kernel (2.6.33.3-11.1-netbook), also it includes the rzscontrol utility and an init script to load the service at startup. You can download it from here and then just install it:

wget http://people.igalia.com/clopez/kmod-compcache-2.6.33.3-11.1.i586.rpm
sudo rpm -ivh kmod-compcache-2.6.33.3-11.1.i586.rpm

I have configured it to use the 75% of the total RAM available on the system for the RAM swap device. I have done different tests and with this configuration I was getting the best of this machine, nevertheless you can change this easily. After installing the package edit the file /etc/init.d/compcache and change the variable ratio=75 at the beginning of the file to what you want and restart the service.