KDE 3.1 takes an age to login.

[ElectronikBean]

Mandrake 9.1 (my first linux!)
200 mhz pentium cpu.

I cant login to the KDE, in fact - it has never logged in. I can login on ICEWM, but the KDE just hangs on a blank screen showing the stopwatch. The HDD crunches, but still no desktop.

I have upgraded the RAM from 32MB to 168MB - still not enough? Maybee I was a bit over enthusiastic about it being a staging web server running apache with php

Any help or suggestions would be appriciated.

Thanks.

 

[RhythmAce]

Both kde and gnome are notorious for eating great gobs of memory. I notice that you have an oddball amount of memory which indicates that you've mixed and matched different memory modules. Either use a matched pair or your largest module to see if things speed up. Even though your system doesn't show an error when you mix memory types, real world situations with memory intensive programs show that the memory is used very inefficiently.

 

[ElectronikBean]

Thanks RhythmAce,

Sorry, it was a typo. I have 160 mb, 128 + 32mb. I have another 128mb dimm in the post now.

So kde and gnome are notorious for this eh? So how much is enough? I only have 2 dimm slots on this old box.

In theory then, unless I need to use the gui (i intend to mainly run apache and file and printer serving), I could run it text only?

Only I would likely have to learn a number of unix commands...

 

[sleipnir214]

There's only so much you can do -- you're running a Pentium 200, which is frankly barely enough for KDE or Gnome.

I've run Linux on machines with that little horsepower on many occasions -- I even ran an active website for 5 years on a P90. But never with a GUI.

Want the best answers? Ask the best questions:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

TANSTAAFL!!

 

[RhythmAce]

If you find the gui is what is slowing you down but you just have to see what you are doing, then you might want to checkout webmin. This program installes on your linux box and can be accessed locally or remotely. The program lets you admin all your servers and your linux system in general. The best thing about it is you can boot into runlevel 3 and save all that memory for your servers. You can find webmin at

http://www.webmin.com