Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!rutgers!mit-eddie!bbn!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!cadre!pitt!cisunx!ejkst
From: ejkst@cisunx.UUCP (Eric J. Kennedy)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Efficient RAM usage for hard-disk-less folks
Message-ID: <11714@cisunx.UUCP>
Date: 11 Aug 88 06:44:24 GMT
References: <1359@csuna.UUCP>
Reply-To: ejkst@unix.cis.pittsburgh.edu (Eric J. Kennedy)
Organization: Univ. of Pittsburgh, Comp & Info Sys
Lines: 63

In article <1359@csuna.UUCP> acphssrw@csuna.UUCP (Stephen R. Walton) writes:
>
>After literally years of thrashing about, I have finally come up with
>a completely satisfactory arrangement for my A1000 which allows
>efficient usage under many circumstances.  I have two floppies, 2.5 MB
>of RAM, and can't justify spending even $650 for a Supra 20 MB hard
>disk at present.  

Sounds very familier.  I have the same setup, and my solutions were
about the same.  My ultimate solution is a hard drive, though.  (It's
now on order, let's hope I see it while I still need it.)

>Obviously, I keep a Workbench floppy handy in
>case I ever need NotePad or Preferences or...
                  ^^^^^^^
Yeah, right.  A power user like you?
I even took a generic 'more' program, named it notepad, and shoved it in
sys:utilities, just for the odd icon that wants it.

>(Mount and/or BindDrivers want icon.library, believe it or not.) I

Yeah, when binddrivers reads the drivers in sys:expansion, (It might
even require df0:expansion, or BootDevice:expansion, or whatever;  It
wouldn't work out of vd0:sys/expansion with sys: assigned to vd0:sys)
it also reads the .info files.  Why?  I don't know.  I ask you, is this
documented anywhere?  Not that I've seen.

[Lots of detail deleted]

It all sounds familier, but right now I'm back to about a 100K vd0:, and
devs:, libs:, l:, and fonts: back on workbench:.  Why?
  LaTeX & Preview -- 1 Meg  (fast loop mode, -R)
  ARexx -- ??  K   
  Uedit -- 600 K    (with _lots_ of custom macros and spelling checker
                     with ram resident dictionary)
  Superbase Pro -- 400 K
  Utils-out-the-butt  -- probably 200 K

  These are approximations, and probably slightly exaggerated.  Still,
you can see why something had to go.  Running all these at once makes
for a heck of a system, though.  Even with all that, running without a
hard disk is only a pain in the neck.  With the amount of raw data I'm
collecting, though, a hard disk has become (close to) a necessity.

>Third:  Tell your shell to look in df0:c and df1:c (and maybe df0:bin
>if you're a Manx C user) as well as the "usual" places.  For the
>Dillon/Drew Shell, you'd use something like
>	set _path=C:,sys:Utilities,sys:Tools,df0:bin,df0:c,df1:c

I've come up with a neat solution.  I've done this, and put all of my
excess cli commands, tools, utilities, etc., ad nauseum, on a series of
disks with color coded labels, called 'RedTools', 'WhiteTools',
'BlueTools', etc.  It's great.


This rambling brought to you courtesy of my research, which keeps me up
at all hours, and in strange moods...
		      (maniacal screaming heard reverberating throughout
		      the computer center --"I HATE graduate school!!")
-- 
------------
Eric Kennedy
ejkst@cisunx.UUCP