Why is linux so slooow!!! 2

[Crusader11]

Hi!
I have been anti-M$ for quite some time but until recently have been hesitant to venture into the world of linux (it is mostly a time factor for me....the learning curve)
However, I just installed linux-mandrake 8.1 on a win98se dual boot system and I have a very basic 'quite newbie' question: Why is it so slow!! <grin> It takes longer to boot, longer for the apps to start and internet is much slower. This is inconsistent with things I have read so I know there must be a bugger somewhere on my system.
I have an AMD Athlon 550, FIC mainboard (there are some ide patches for that that I haven't installed for linux and don't know where to find for linux), 256mb ram, 40 gig drive with 256 for cache (windoze has 25%) I have tried Netscape, Konquerer and mozilla all with the same results.
Any ideas?
Thanks for reading this!!
Trisha Salas

 

[iSeriesCodePoet]

Don't flame me for this:

My friend, you have listened too much at the hype. It IS faster in consol mode. A straight text interface. However, with X, it does seem to be slower, why? Possibly wrong, or not optimized video drivers. Mike Wills
RPG Programmer (but learning Java)

&quot;Kernel Panic has performed an Illegal Operation, so I must defrag the situation before Dr. Watson reads the logs and discovers a lost cluster.&quot;

 

[rycamor]

The fact that you mention IDE patches leads me to think your system is probably not optimized for you hard drive. Unless the IDE settings can be properly detected Mandrake will probably default to the most conservative settings for IDE hard drive usage. You can often double your program startup speed by changing these settings.

The utility to change hard drive settings is &quot;hdparm&quot;. Before playing with it, though, you should read the manual (&quot;man hdparm&quot carefully. Also, read this article at Linux.com:

http://linux.com/howto/mini/Ultra-DMA-8.html

Also, Mandrake tends to install all kinds of things you don't need, and (worse) run all kinds of services you don't need to run. If you are trying to use Mandrake as a desktop only, you can probably disable over half of these, and get some more speed out of your system. Go into terminal mode and enter the command &quot;top&quot;. If there are more than 12-15 processes running, then look to see if things like &quot;sendmail&quot;, &quot;httpd&quot;, &quot;postfix&quot;, &quot;mysql&quot;, &quot;postgres&quot;, &quot;emb-perl&quot; are running. Each of these are server programs, not desktop programs, and will be constantly eating resources.

That having been said, I will have to agree that much of the hype of Linux will not be found in the desktop/graphics area, but in how Linux performs as a server. Graphic environments take more processing power; there is no way around that. If you are using one of the big userfriendly Linux graphical environments such as KDE or Gnome, you will find that they take time. If you choose one of the faster graphical environments like WindowMaker, Blackbox, Small Window Manager, etc... You will notice your system runs much faster.

On my Slackware Linux system, with similar hardware to yours, I boot into command prompt mode in about 6-8 seconds, and then I can start Blackbox in about 2 seconds. Mozilla still takes time to run, but that's because it is a monster program. Try Galeon, which uses the mozilla DHTML renderer, but packages much more tightly.

In the end, it is possible to run Linux with that legendary speed, but it requires the user to spend some time learning how Linux works, and how to tweak it.

 

[Crusader11]

Hi again,
Both responses here have been helpful and thank you very much!
I have checked and it has installed my AGP card as a PCI card, I am going to look into that one.
I will also disable all server apps (I am a web designer and looking forward to The Gimp but am hosting remotely) and will try your other suggestions especially the windowing environment...am running KDE.
This forum is wonderfull!!
Trisha Salas