How do you do.

[OldChap]

The nickname is descriptive, I fall into the "over fifties" demographic.

I am a keen distributed computing participant and have come here to learn how to use Mint as an OS for such. The by-product of this will, I hope, allow me to branch out into general use. (hence the decision to use Mint in the first place)

My primary questions will be related to things like where to learn about dependencies?, things I need to learn to employ a ramdrive?, making programs run on a particular HDD? etc. etc.

So, greetings to all and in the meantime I'm off to look around the forum to see if there is a thriving jokes page

[xenopeek]

Hi OldChap, welcome to the Linux Mint forums Thanks for giving Linux Mint a try! There are lots of forum members in the "over fifties" demographic, so you should fit right in

Ramdrive is easy. On Linux you can mount a directory into memory with tmpfs (it is volatile; all files lost after logging out). A common action is to make /tmp (the temporary files directory) a ramdrive, to decrease hard disk wear. To do so, you would have to edit the /etc/fstab configuration file, like with this command from the terminal:

Code: Select all

gksudo gedit /etc/fstab

And at the end of the file add the following. After reboot your /tmp directory is now mounted into memory (e.g., a ramdrive):

Code: Select all

 none /tmp     tmpfs nodev,nosuid,mode=1777 0 0

Be sure also to check out the Community website (ideas, tutorials, and hardware and software reviews), and the Cinnamon Spices website for adding themes, applets and extensions to Cinnamon (and if you haven't installed Cinnamon, see here a recent update for a teaser).

You can also chat in real-time with other Linux Mint users. In the Mint Menu, in the Internet section, start the application XChat IRC. You will automatically get connected to #linuxmint-chat for general chat and #linuxmint-help for support with other Linux Mint users

[nunol]

Welcome to the Linux Mint Forums OldChap!

You can also use zram in place of tmpfs, requires less ram at the expense of greater processing overhead if what you write to the zram is compressible: http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Zram_disks

Cheers.

[The-Wizard]

Welcome to the Mint family forums


wizard

[OldChap]

Thanks for the welcome guys (for the record and to avoid confusion, in my book gals are guys too)

Wow Vincent, ... a lot of things at once, thank you. I see then that I need to learn the parameters of tmpfs especially if at some time I need to define size of drive. A good place for me to start.

nunol: Ram I have and the prog I want to trial this on is moving info from HDD and compressing ready for onward transmission. I will trial Vincent's way first I think.

Big place this forum, I hope the search tool serves me well, that way If I need to ask questions they can be more specific.