Linked by Binh Nguyen on Wed 7th Jan 2004 18:08 UTC
When Knoppix was first released it was heralded as revolutionary in the Linux world. Its autodetection and configuration capabilities were unsurpassed. Many of my colleagues remarked that if 'KNOPPIX can't do it, Linux can't do it'. Theoretically, one would be able to get a Knoppix CD, pop it into an arbitrary system, run it, save one's data to a partition, USB stick, etc....), reboot and the existing system would be left completely as it was before the CD was placed in the system.
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Although this has been touched before I want to explain the memory reporting on linux more.
Linux uses a disk cache. This means when you load something from disk it will be cached in memory so that the next time you access the same thing it will be in memory and you don't need to go to the disk again. Linux will do that until your memory is full and then it will remove some old cached data and replace that will the newly read data.
As a consequence on most system top will always report free memory around 0. The important thing is to see how much swap is used which indicates if you are using virtual memory or not. The swap memory usage in the original example was reported as 0 which means that the computer had enough memory to run without swapping.
On my system top also reports how much of the used memory is caching data.
Another point made in the article is about virtual desktops and memory. Already other people have said that it does not take extra memory but I want to explain more here why this is the case. Virtual desktops under X are implemented by the window manager by hiding/unhiding and moving windows. So when you switch to another desktop the window manager will hide the current visible windows and unhide the ones from the other desktop. This means that for the same number of applications open for memory it doesn't matter if you have 2 or 4 virtual desktops.