Arch Linux

BaconPie

Member

Registered: 2010-08-11

Posts: 209

[2/3 SOLVED] RAID on boot - Lots of RAM being used - Conky shadow

Hi everyone, this is my first post here. I can't seem to find a solution to three of my problems with my Arch install. Actually, I can find solutions however none of them work!

This screenshot contains information on all parts of my problems. If you need any more info let me know.

First of all, RAID.
I have four HDD's. One 80GB with my Arch install, another 80GB with Mac OSX installed and two 500GB set up in RAID0 (stripped - 1TB). I wanted to mount the 1TB so that I could access all of my pictures and music. After digging through lots of guides I came across this one that worked. I typed:

$ modprobe dm_mod
$ dmraid -ay
$ mount /dev/mapper/nvidia_ejjijgaep2 /mnt/Windows/

And hey presto! Windows was mounted and I could browse my files! The process was similar to something I'd have done on fedora except /dev/mapper wasn't already there; on Arch you have to initialize it with dmraid -ay.

Anyway, I wanted Windows to mount every time I booted so I went to edit fstab but before I did that I decided to reboot and check that /dev/mapper stuck. It never, /dev/mapper disappears after a reboot.

A little further down that guide it says to put dm_mod in the 'Modules' section and dmraid in the 'Hooks' section of the file /etc/mkinitcpio.conf. I did that (as you can see in the screen shot above - it's the big one on the left.) After doing this, /dev/mapper still isn't appearing after a reboot.

So, I've resorted to writing a script (bottom middle) to get the job done. I run that when I log in and Windows is mounted just fine. But... but.. that isn't the right way of doing things. It's sloppy. I want to mount my partition with fstab! Can anyone help?

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SOLVED!
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It turns out that /dev/mapper is now appearing on boot. I've edited my fstab to auto mount Windows as read only on boot now. Here is it's line in /etc/fstab:

/dev/mapper/nvidia_ejjijgaep2  /mnt/Windows  ntfs  ro,user,auto,unhide 0 0

And interesting point to note: ntfs-3g requires root access - mount does not pass on the 'user' bit from fstab. This isn't a problem as it is mounted when booting anyway.

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Second on the list, I have an unusually high amount of RAM being used. Now, I know that unused memory is wasted memory but this is ridiculous, I have some xterms, google chrome, rhythmbox and conky open. Why the hell am I at 99% memory usage? I know it could be cached from when I loaded gimp and Thunderbird earlier but even so, 4GB is a lot. Has it cached all of my music or something?

See, this wouldn't usually be a problem but, my windows are going sluggish when it gets this high, not really slow, the system menu and new xterms appear almost instantaneously. Dragging them is a little slower though. I'm running fluxbox, have 4GB memory and a 2.4GHz quad core and my windows are going sluggish when only two (heavy) programs are loaded. Something is wrong here... maybe a memory leak?

Halp.

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Third: Conky has a shadow around it. How do I get rid of it?

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SOLVED!
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I got rid of the shadow by using the capital C switch for xcompmgr:

xcompmgr -C -f -D3 & # transparency/shadows with 2 millisecond fade

Thanks for the help.

Last edited by BaconPie (2010-08-12 13:40:29)