Fedora Core 3 Too Slow...
 

I am wondering what distro of linux would work best on my PC. It is a 500MhZ P3 Processor with 512MB RAM, a 10GB Hard drive, and a pretty bad video card.

Fedora core 3 ran pretty slowly on the computer so I'm looking for a distro that might work a bit better for my computer. Any reccommendations? It doesn't have to have a big memory using desktop environment, although the option of using KDE and Gnome would be nice.

Thanks!

it's not FC3 that's slow... it's KDE or Gnome... don't blame something that's not at fault!

No .. I am not sure that' the only reason. Yes KDE and Gnome are both bloated .. you can use fluxbox or ICEWM and live in the past, but they do work :-))
Other quiet significant reason is some distro's are optimized for 686 arch ... and others stay with the basc 386 .. that does cause some performance pentalty.
I have given up on FC .. I used FC1 and FC2 .. they were VERY both slow, though I never confirmed this, but I was told that even the kernel code in FC is compiled with
-g option .. as are most of packages .. that makes every thing run like a dog . .(or a bitch if you prefer).
Gentoo can be comipled on your machine .. and could be faster but it's a hassle to maintain.
Try Arch or Vector .. or plain Debian .. they will all be better than FC .. They all have some extra work to be done, Arch with some hardware detection and package management, Vector I have never tried .. but it's a gentoo flavor I think , and Debian Sarge could be used out of the box .. but it's setup is still command line based.
Even Suse is faster than FC, I never could like Mandrake.

Oh ,.. I forgot to mention CentOS .. if you really like FC .. CentOS is surely at lest 40% faster on machine .. (compare to FC !!!)
it's a copy of RHEL 4.0 .. and there are other flavors like Whtebox and one more I forget the name of .

I like CentOS .. for two reasons .. 1) you can get EVERYthing for it. 2) .. it's put together nicely (it's red hat .. so things are pretty clean).

You need to disable services that you don't use.

This would be my suggestion, as well!

centos will not run ANY faster than fedora... not at all.

Thanks for all of the replies! I am considering Slackware or Debian. I am looking for a distro that doesn't use a whole lot of resources and also works well for new linux users. Also, do either of these have a graphical based installation or are they both text?

Thanks!

Slackware and Debian use text only installers. As for a ditro that doesn't use up many resources, Fedora could have been the same if you disabled services that you don't use. A few minutes spent tweaking your distro I all you need to do.

Could someone explain to me how by disabling some services you will get a "faster" response.
The services you are not using take miniscule amount of CPU time .. if any, I have rarely seen my machine use swap (unless I am compiling something or other "non-standard" things) so they don't really contribute to extar disk activity ..I have heard this argument before .. but I can't jreally find no reason for this reasoning .. enlighten me !!

I couldn't install FC3 on my machine (installer bug) .. but am quiet convinced that RHEL is a cleaner & most likely a faster version of the code. FC is really a "beta" for the RHEL and they certainly use it get test cycles on the upcoming release.

When you start services that you don't need, there is ram and other system resources being unnecessarily used. in a system where you are low on ram, then your system may become sluggish especially if you then decide to use a DE such as GNOME or KDE. You system also boots up slower if you have a lot of services to start.

I use CentOS 4 and I still disable services that I don't need even though I have 512MB or ram. This is good for conserving system resources as well as for security reasons, because you reduce the number of "loop holes" that a cracker can use to break into your system.

Maybe I'm just old and crusty (I'm 22 years old), but I found the Slackware and Debian installers to be much easier than the Fedora Anaconda installer. Multiple menus and submenus on a page with forward and back buttons and radio buttons and checkboxes tend to confuse me. Debian was just (OK) and (Cancel) and (Back), doing one thing at a time. The only time I ever made a mistake with an install was with FC4, when I accidentally overwrote my MBR, which I guess is my fault, but I never did that with any other installer. Does anybody else feel the same way? Please don't flame me if you love Anaconda or you think I'm stupid.

--C

I agree with you, Slackwares installation maybe text based but its just as good as the gui ones. I feel the same for the new Debian installer and FreeBSD's sysinstall. I think some people associate anything textmode with complexity so get put off by distros hat use them.

reddazz .. you seem to gloss over the fact that your ram based argument only applies when you actually start using swap space.
If you aren't using swap then your system essentially is all incore and whethere some service you don't use is using the memory or noone is using the memory the result is same .. you have free ram.
As I have said before ... I can count on one hand when I EVER used the swap space .. (huge .. huge compiles ) normally this doesn't matter. The only difference in performance is what compiple ootions were used .. and in that FC1/2/3 are pretty bad.

I read an interesting thread on the RedHat site a little while back that seems to disprove this theory. If only I had kept the link to the thread.....