High resource Usage in Opensuse 10.3

Probably the biggest complaint that remains is the high resource utilisation of Opensuse 10.3. I find that compared to Windows, Opensuse is quite a resource hog. KDE which I use could be the reason, and less intensive GUI's could reduce RAM usage at the cost of usability. In a system with 224 MB RAM, I find that just about 5 MB is left unused after a couple of browsers are loaded. And the constant hard disk access for the swapping takes its toll on the hard disk and power consumption. The solution may be to add more RAM.

Partition tools : (thinking) out of the box

After a round of playing with partitions - both NTFS and EXT2 - I have come to the conclusion that as far as partition tools related to Windows OS is concerned, one needs to think "Linux" to get the best free choices.
The default disk manager does not do much in Windows, and unlike the more thoughtful Linux counterparts, does not allow the user a second chance before applying changes. So if you are confronted with a situation other than creating and deleting partitions, Linux offers a better choice of tools - full blown, GUI supported tools.
While one can use fdisk to delete and create partitions, the real ace is Gparted. This tool not only can create and delete partitions, it can also resize them - including Windows partitions. And making it truely accessibly is the fact that Puppylinux - a 80 MB Linux distro that is so accommodating and flexible to fit and boot from any medium - includes this great tool.

My problem involved a partition that was too small to fit a linux distro. Assuming that a 2 GB partition would be adequate for Opensuse 10.3, I installed the OS to that partition, after removing some unwanted apps before installation. But post installation, I was regularly reminded that I had less than 1% of the disk free. The only solution was to shorten the adjoining NTFS partition and claim more space. The inbuilt partition tool in Opensuse managed this quite admirably. I reduced the NTFS partition by 500 MB and created a new partition to mount /home/. The resizing of the NTFS paritition also sets a chkdsk operation on the next Windows boot. But this did not aleviate the problem of reduced space to install apps - most notably VLC since Opensuse is quite multimedia handicapped out of the box. The second idea was to fuse the newly created /home/ partition with the original partition containing the rest of the installation. To my surprise I found that the inbuilt partition tool in Opensuse did not do expansion -apparently resizing only meant reducing in Opensuse lingo.
My search for partition expansion tools took me to ntfsresize. This command line tool seemed capable of helping me but unlike most of Linux tools did not have a comprehensive documentation which make it unattractive. But ntfsresize is a capable tool that can check NTFS partitions for errors. Unlike fsck.ntfs that also exists, ntfsresize is a resizing tool that actually tests for volume consistency as a step to checking the amount of free space available on that drive (as a precursor to finding the smallest possible size it can be squeezed to). ntfsresize -fi /dev/sdx.
I recalled Puppylinux's partition tool and decided to test it's expansion skills since it was the fastest way I could boot into Linux, since I had already installed it on a USB Drive (by the way, after installing Puppy linux, the drive is rendered unsuable in Windows eventhough Puppy creates a 128 MB FAT partition on the drive. Windows asks whether the drive needs to be formatted when it is plugged in.
Gparted offers all the options to manipulate a parition - expand, reduce, delete, create etc. While it warns to backup the data before starting the partition manipulation, I overlooked it. The /home partition was deleted, the original 2 GB partition was then expanded to include the free space. It may have taken about 15 mins in all.

Getting the hang of it

I believe the journey of a Windows user into the Linux world would be similar for everyone. In my case, after starting off two months back, today I find myself being able to do most of the stuff that I want to do as easily as I could in Windows. Most significantly, I do not feel too tied down by the shortcomings of the GUI and do not mind relying on the commands to overcome these.
Some of the commands that I think a Linux user will need on a daily basis :

df -h: shows disk usage.
ntfs-3g : it is only required if the user still has data in NTFS partitions. This is used to allow writing into such partitions. There is a GUI for this tool, but in my experience using the GUI can be a pain. The menu will not launch the tool, and using the GUI produces results that are not always predictable. The command line is easier and can be launched as and when required.
dir/ls : both list folder contents. But the results are different and some distros do not recognise the dir command. ls is better since it is able to properly name filenames with spaces in them (with a "\" inserted).
[tab]: this is a sanity tool. When confronted with filenames like "filename.xxx-xx.xx.xx", a press of this button will autocomplete the filename freeing the user the headache of typing out the long list of numbers. Just using file[tab] is enough (unless similar named files also exist).
less : strangely named command that restricts the screen output to one page length. Especially useful when dealing with ls/dir output in a command prompt not launched from within KDE.

Opensuse revisited

One major reason I ventured into Puppy linux territory was because I wanted to install Linux on a partition that was about 1.5 GB. Since I could not recall seeing any major distro offering a program selection menu in the live CD prior to install, I was lost for a means to reduce the installation size to fit into that partition. Hence a small distro like Puppy was turned to.

A chance discovery in the course of reinstalling Opensuse 10.3 was that there was an option to choose packages - though this was NOT a live CD. Ofcourse, I faced the issue of reinstalling Opensuse because the PC Linux installation would not allow applications to be uninstalled (RPM database not accessible error) and Kopete also crashed. So, Opensuse 10.3 again proved a better choice.