This project contains my personal configuration for Debian Xfce running on low memory machines like my old Mac Mini "late 2009" with 4GB RAM and an Asus EeePC with 2GB RAM. The Mac Mini is still fast enough for what I need, including compiling, but opening several web pages in Firefox quickly ends up using more memory than it has.
The Ansible playbook currently configures swaping on zram if the system has less than 16GiB of RAM. Fedora already uses a similar configuration since Fedora 33. The kernel uses lzo-rle by default, which is a pretty good compromise between speed and compression ratio.
My playbook supports Debian Buster and Bullseye. Due to a limitation in the zram-tools package in Buster, you can't choose the algorithm, and you have to set the CORES variable explicitly to 1. This prevents zram-tools from creating as many zram disks as cores, each using a number of threads equal to the number of cores, which brings the system to its knees (this was fixed in Bullseye, whose version of zram-tools also lets you pick the compression algorithm).
After you install Ansible and Git via sudo apt install ansible git,
clone this repo:
cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/lpancescu/debian-desktop.git
cd debian-desktop
ansible-playbook -K local.yml
You can change the zram_use_threshold_mb variable in the hosts file to the amount of memory you consider enough to not need zram. The default is 16384, so zrm is not configured if you have more than 16GB RAM. You can also delete this line altogether if you don't want zram.
You can also adapt the install_pkgs variable to list any additional packages you would like to install (or remove the variable altogether if you don't need to install anything).
all:
hosts:
localhost:
ansible_connection: local
vars:
zram_use_threshold_mb: 16384
install_pkgs:
- needrestart
- vimYou can now run the playbook:
ansible-playbook -i hosts -K local.yml
The changes will take effect the next time you boot the system.