1) Slow performance OpenBSD 5.0 on an old hardware 2) pkg_add cups - returns an error
 

Hi,

I've just installed OpenBSD 5.0. Here is the hardware configuration:
PIII 899Mhz, 20 GB IDE, 512 MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9600, LCD 1280x1024 -
it is very old hardware.

1) However compared to Slackware 12.2 which is also installed, OpenBSD is rather slow. I am a desktop user - internet, word processing, some
scientific computations (nothing really serious), multimedia etc.

Here I have to mention that one of the most annoying thing to me is difficulty with gamma correction settings. I spent hours to properly set
the gamma for my LCD Hewlett-Packard LCD - no success. This is not due to the LCD - under Slackware is OK. Don't know - maybe I should try older version of Xorg. Or to drop Xorg completely and to try XFree86.

2) Yesterday I tried to install cups (LPD is default - but I don't have so much time to properly to configure LPD), after several tries 'pkg_add cups' finally I captured an error message - from python - something
about "empty argument" (I tried to redirect the message to a file :( .

Installing from a disk also doesn't work

If you wonder why I try to use OpenBSD as a desktop - in fact OpenBSD is simpler to maintain than "default desktops *nix".

Help are very wlecomed

Lots of OpenBSD desktop users. Some have it on older hardware that you are using *grin*.

In real world terms speed is relative and can be infuenced by many factors. Are you suing the same desktop environment, similar swap sizes, etc. One thing I have had people tell me (though I've not noticed it myself is that the ATI video drivers on the various BSD's aren't quite as efficient as those for Linux. If true, it may contribute to the perceied slowness - as well as affecting the problems adjusting gamma.

Sorry can't offer any insight on the cups issue as I haven't tried it on OpenBSD.

Did you get pkg_add to work in OpenBSD? If not, did you export your package path so pkg_add knows which mirror to point to? I use this command to set my package path for the ftp server I use:

# export PKG_PATH=ftp://ftp3.usa.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/5.0/packages/i386/

Yes, pkg_add on my system works well for most packages. In the case of a few ones however it returns the same error.