When to Reboot?
 

As a general rule are there types of programs that need to have a reboot in order to be truly 'gone' or installed? I ask this because when I am at work and away from my charger I don't want to waste precious battery life by rebooting. As a Linux newbie I am wondering about programs that may stay in memory (or whatever) and won't be removed till a proper shutdown is done. An example would be my backlight. I have advanced backlight installed and my battery drained quickly today at work. So fast that I didn't get a full day out of light use. I changed the settings in the control panel and the backlight would not go off even after I locked my N810 with the lock button. After a reboot it was back to normal. Had I known I needed a reboot I would have done it after installation but I didn't see anything indicating I needed to do that. Just wondering if there is a Linux rule of thumb that should be followed when installing/uninstalling. Thanks

Re: When to Reboot?
 

Generally speaking, no. Speaking as a N8x0 newbie but an experienced Debian user, a properly packaged application has a set of scripts which are called when installing or removing. There is or can be a preinst, postinst, prerm and postrm.

The prerm generally stops the application (removing from memory), before it is uninstalled, which removes its memory footprint, then deletes the files, which removes its disk footprint.

Generally, the only thing you should have to reboot for is a kernel upgrade. And since the kernel is fairly static, you shouldn't have a problem with the Maemo platform.

--vr

Re: When to Reboot?
 

It guess it should be like that, but in my experience, it isn't. If I open a bunch of windows in MicroB, the NIT will remain sluggish even after I've closed them all. Rebooting fixes the sluggishness.

Re: When to Reboot?
 

i reboot when modest mail periodically gives me error messages about "incorrect user name or password" for my gmail accounts. mostly because i don't know what else to do. seems to help sometimes. does anyone else do this?

Re: When to Reboot?
 

Unfortunately I need to reboot every time I finish using Skype.... cannot lock the device otherwise.

Re: When to Reboot?
 

I would agree with the statement that the only thing you should have to reboot for is a kernel update (or a very serious lock-up). However, there are times where it is simpler (especially for new users) to just reboot, because you sometimes need a lot of understanding about the app, or the operation that you're performing. Sometimes, it saves time and annoyance, but getting into the Windows-mentality of rebooting to solve problems doesn't actually help you in the long run, if you still don't understand the problem.
This is essentially my line of reasoning :D

Re: When to Reboot?
 

That's browserd for you. browserd looks great on paper: multiple applications can use single instance of browserd for HTML rendering, saving loads and loads of memory. Applicaiton start-up times (that requires HTML rendering) are shorter, and in addition browserd puts an end to all armed conflicts on this piece of rock.

In reality, though, Browser is pretty much the only application that uses browserd. browserd is very lazy in releasing allocated memory, and that combined with the fact that browserd is always running in the background you've got yourself a daemon that ends up hogging all available memory.

Re: When to Reboot?
 

the question I have to ask is, WHY does a compiler take so long to start in the first place?

a HTML renderers job is to read in files and process them into a DOM document tree with coordinates.

gcc does more than this with my source files every day and doesn't take so long to get going.

Re: When to Reboot?
 

An HTML renderer tries to cope with all sorts of invalid or badly formed documents and do its best to produce some reasonable output for the user. This is because most web documents today are invalid HTML (just look at how many errors this page has for example).

A C compiler on the other hand has the luxury of being able to give up at the first sign of broken input and make it the developer's responsibility to produce valide code.

Re: When to Reboot?
 

I reboot all the time... I am unclean.... :(

Aside from lock ups and slowdowns, the only "reason" I reboot is because for some weird reason, screen rotation stops working randomly, and rebooting fixes it.