rayparrish

Hello,

I'm new to Ubuntu and was installing Gambas yesterday. It's a programming language like Visual Basic. There were 57 package files in the installation and it took around and hour and 15 minutes to install during which time the screen was unresponsive for the most part. I could see the hard drive light flickering so I knew it was writing and reading files.

Is this normal for Ubuntu? When I installed it this last time I didn't create a swap partition as I thought it would do that itself so I don't have a swap and only have 512 meg of ram 128 of which is used for the video card.

Thanks, Later, Ray Parrish

rayparrish

Hello again,

Today I installed html docs with Synaptic and it took over 2 hours to complete the installation of the one package file of html files. When it was compllete I could not find any new html files on my filesystem.

Is it normal for Ubuntu to take so long to install things?

Later, Ray Parrish

Linux_tech

512mb RAM is low but does meet requirements. What are the rest of your system specs? As far as installing Ubuntu, two things- xubuntu is a version of ubuntu that will run better than ubuntu on systems with lower hardware specs.
If you install ubuntu , there is an alternate cd that can be downloaded that will install better on systems with lower specs, less memory, etc.

Regarding installing applications through Synaptic- Install time depends on the application, the size of the package and whether its installed over the network or from a local source. A small local package should only take 5-10 minutes to install. Did you check the minimum requirements for the Gambas application to make sure your computer met the recommended? The install could have run low on memory if there was no swap location.

If you are experiencing performance issues, then I would recommend that you narrow down what is causing the bottleneck; you can use top or htop for this. You can optimize your system as well to make it boot faster and run better.

Yes you should have a swap partition. 2*n MB is the rule of thumb, see this for more info
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq

techieMoe

From where were you installing the packages? If it was a network install (meaning not off the CDROM) then you should pick a different mirror. Obviously the one you're using doesn't give you a very good connection.

I've had packages take anywhere from 10 seconds to thirty minutes depending on the mirror. There's an option in your "Software Sources" control panel that should allow you to choose a different mirror site, or even let it test several to pick the fastest one.

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techieMoe

No, I'm sorry, but that's simply bad advice. In the past it might have been valid, but 2x your RAM is wasteful and very unlikely to be used. Purchasing more RAM is a better option, as RAM will always perform faster than harddrive space used for swap.

For a computer with 512 MB of RAM, another 512 is about the maximum I would recommend allocating to a swap partition. On systems with 1GB or more, no swap or a small swap of 128MB works fine.

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Linux_tech

Your correct, upgrading the RAM is the best solution, its so simple to do and adding a GB doesn't cost much

rayparrish

Hello again,

I followed the link you gave and created and enabled a swap file of 512 MB. Shortly after doing so I received an update notice and the update went smoothly even though two of the files in it were around 18 MB. It only took a few minutes and the screen was responsive the whole time.

Hopefully the swap file has solved the slow issue for me.

Later, Ray Parrish

rayparrish

Hello,

I wasn't having a problem with the download portion of installs, that usually goes quite smoothly, it's the unpacking and installing portion of the installs which have been taking forever and freezing up the screen.

After installing linux-html-docs package which took two hours I found the html files and was amazed how many folders and files had been created from one 14 meg download. NO wonder it took so long to install them all.

Later, Ray Parrish

techieMoe

Are you attempting to download and install Gambas manually, one package at a time? I would definitely not recommend this. The easiest (and fastest) way to install anything in Ubuntu or Debian is to use the package manager. In this case you want Synaptic Package manager. Just do a search for Gambas.

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rayparrish

Hello again,

Well, I have installed a variety of packages over the course of the day, and have had no screen freezes or extended disk writing activity during the course of them so I'd say that creating and activating a swap file has done the trick.

Many thanks to the person who sent the link to the swap file page.

Later, Ray Parrish