[PLUG] Linux upgrade issues

["Eric at Lucii.org" <eric@lucii.org>]

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As noted in previous emails, I upgraded my main workstation to Mint Linux Cinnamon (64 bit version.)

Well... it has become more than a little frustrating.  See:  http://lucii.org/hulk_eric.jpg
Yeah, in addition to extreme muscles, I grow hair :-)

My workstation is an 4 year old ASUS motherboard with an Athlon 64 X2 processor and 4 GB of ECC RAM.

After running for a day (or less) the system becomes intolerably slow and must be rebooted.
It appears to be caused by memory consumption - the hard drive is constantly active and the
memory usage nears 100% with lots of swapping.  Clicking on a window may take 15 or more
seconds to render (yike!)

I abandoned Cinnamon and switched to KDE.  That seems to have delayed the onset of the problem
but it still happens.  I can either kill all application windows or just reboot.
[Aside: I'm back on board with KDE.  Finally, it's a useful as the last of the 3.5 version was
and I was a KDE 3.5 devotee.]

Here is an example where it's working tolerably well with KDE:
root@ursa:~# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       3083472    2658096     425376          0      22876     375232
- -/+ buffers/cache:    2259988     823484
Swap:      3906556    1486848    2419708

So it is using almost 90% of RAM and almost half of the swap in "normal" conditions.
Also, why only 3 GB of RAM?  I have 4 GB of RAM and thought that 64 bit systems would use ALL of it.
[ Face palm... will run memory test at next reboot - probably before noon :-( ]

Could this be related to a 64 bit kernel and should I just switch back to 32 bit?
I'm thinking of trying the 32 bit version of Ubuntu 12.04 and adding KDE to get a usable GUI.

Your thoughts and/or suggestions?

Eric
- -- 
#  Eric Lucas
#
#                "Oh, I have slipped the surly bond of earth
#                 And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings...
#                                        -- John Gillespie Magee Jr

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