I've been using Linux for two months now, so I know what I'm doing… somewhat. I do have a lot of questions, which I've been accumulating over time. I'd be ecstatic if anyone answered even one of them, since the ones I've posted to the official Ubuntu forums and gnu.emacs.help (questions 5 and 4, respectively) have gone quite unanswered. Okay, here we go: (I'm using Edgy, by the way.)

1. I have a three-gigabyte swap partition, but it seems to be off by default. After each time I boot up my computer, System Monitor reports that I have no swap space, and the partition doesn't have a lock icon next to it in GParted. I can turn it on with the "swapon" menu item in GParted, but then it returns to its former state when I shut down and boot up again Now, shouldn't the swap be turned on automatically at boot-time? Or does it only turn on when the system actually needs it? (I've never even used that much memory at once.) If the former is the case, should I just write a script to do it, or is there some special option I ought to enable?

2. I have uncorrectable bad eyesight, so I use a large (18-point) font with GNOME Terminal. But that makes the default size of the terminal window so large that it covers the whole screen, forcing me to reduce each window I open. Is there some way to change the default size?

3. Also because of the aforementioned bad eyesight, I like to keep my monitor's resolution at 1024 x 768, a notch down from the default of 1280 x 1024 that Ubuntu assigned to me. Most programs don't mind, but those in the OpenOffice suite don't adapt to the change well. They're artificially magnified, so that when a document is at 100% zoom, the rulers are longer than actual rulers, the pages are wider, etc. How can I fix this? (My monitor is a Planar PE170, if that's relevant.)

4. Another eyesight-related problem arises from some strangely buggy font rendering in emacs-snapshot-gtk. The default font looks like this:

Xi31.photobucketY/albums/c395/mimir227/emacs.png
(Replace the "X" with the WWW's official protocol and the "Y" with a dot-com. Very silly, I know, but I had to work around the no-posting-addresses-'til-you've-posted-at-least-one-message rule.)

Some fonts look a little better, but they all suffer from this distorted-bitmap effect. Does anybody know how to fix this? Bear in mind that I'm completely new to Emacs in particular, so if the solution involves changing some arcane option, please explain, or point me in the direction
of an explanation.

5. Now, one last, relatively hacky question. Some time ago, I wanted to create some new MIME types, or rather, alter the MIME type-sniffing techniques Nautilus or Gnome or Linux or whatever's the culprit here uses. I want the system to automatically recognize my old Word documents, among other things.

So, I read the section on MIME types in the GNOME Desktop System Administration Guide, and then I tried the "application/x-newtype" example it gives. It worked, in the sense that gnomevfs-info says that testing.xyz is of the new type, but Nautilus hasn't been so well-behaved. When I open the window of the folder containing testing.xyz, the "Type" and "MIME Type" columns (I'm using list view) read "new mime type" and "application/x-newtype", as they should. But when I select the file, after a moment, the type becomes "plain text document" and the MIME type becomes "text/plain". They stay that way until I close the window and reopen it; then, the cycle restarts. Meanwhile, Nautilus doesn't recognize the new MIME type at all in testing.xyz's Properties window, and when I use the terminal, the "file" command says it's ASCII text. (Which it is, but shouldn't "file" be affected by Overrides.xml?) What's going on, and what can I do?

(Incidentally, I stumbled upon someone else asking this same question elsewhere:

XgnomesupportY/forums/viewtopic.php?t=12436&sid=d5667112185caecd22bb6ad28df97900
(That "Y"'s a dot-org.)

But as you can see, it too went unanswered. That doesn't bode well.)

FYI, putting a bunch of questions in a single post reduces the possibility of an answer. Remember, everyone here and many other forums are volunteers. I would also recommend http://www.ubuntuforums.org/ if you're an Ubuntu user. It's very good and very active.

3GB is waaaaay more than you need. Obviously you haven't needed any thus far. In any event, make sure you have a line similar to this in /etc/fstabFor #3. I had that problem, then figured out (duh) I had somehow set my view to 'Web Layout' instead of 'Print Layout'. This was on a 1280 x 1024, but the symptoms were the same.

For #4. If you're new to Linux and aren't stuck on Emacs, my answer is to use gVim. I've seen the same thing with other people's emacs.

Oh, I'm sorry. I figured it would be better to put all my questions in one post rather than saturating the board with threads, all at once or over time. Or perhaps you meant I ought to ask fewer questions in the first place. Fair enough.

I did indeed ask a question on the Ubuntu Forums, but I didn't get a response.

My swap's too big, you say? I read that it's supposed to be twice the size of your RAM, and I figured that since I had hard-disk space to burn, I might as well add another gigabyte. But yes, I can believe that such excess doesn't do any good, so I've cut the partition back to two GB. I also changed the line in /etc/fstab regarding the swap as you suggested; thank you for that.

I do tend to use Web Layout in OpenOffice a lot, but the problem persists in Page Layout.

I like Vim, actually; I'm just attracted to Emacs because it sounds to be more customizable. I think I'll just use the command-line version and avoid the issue altogether.

Ask as many questions as you need to ask. It's just that one or two related questions are more likely to garner a response. IMHO, it's because the post is shorter and more likely to be read. I've already started to answer your questions. People will see responses and move on; they don't have time or the inclination to read the entire thread. Unfortunately for you, I don't use Emacs, so I can't really help you. One of the people that is NOT reading this thread because there are already replies might be the one that is an Emacs expert.

2GB!!! Still way too big. That 2x's RAM thumbrule is about as old as the /usr/src/linux symlink. If you have 1.5GB of RAM (guessing 'cause you had 3GB of swap).

I've used both Vim and Emacs. Still like Vim better FWIW.

I see. So, what is the proper way to size one's swap? I have 1 GB of RAM.

It will ultimately depend on what you're using the machine to do. I wouldn't make more than 1GB of swap, probably only 512MB or maybe even 256MB for a "general purpose" PC. With the exception of nVidia drivers and JDK, I build everything from source on my machine (with 1GB of RAM and 512MB of swap). The test-suites tend to be more RAM hungry than the actual compilation, but even then I've never seen more than 100MB of swap used and that's while I'm multitasking.

The swap won't be used unless space is unavailable in RAM. So you can see the less RAM you have, the more you need swap space. And the more swap space you'll need.

There was one time that I needed more swap than I had RAM + swap. The sparse matrix portion of the Octave Forge test suite needed 1.5GB of swap (plus the 1GB of RAM) to complete. That was a one time thing and all I did was use a spare partition as swap (20GB, hehe) to complete the test suite.

All right, so… half a gigabyte should be fine, then. Thanks!