My friend is running linux, knoppix 3.4 on his computer, a 400mhz AMD k6, and that thing seems like it blazes, and stable, I have a P4 1.8ghz and it does not seem as fast as his, I have tried many distros with similar results, freezing apps, very slow load times, and crashes, what could be up, I am currently using suse 9.1 pro, it is slow, mozilla sometimes hangs, and sometimes crashes all open mozillas, xine crashes when i play a movie. What is wrong do i need to recompile my kernel or something, or is something not proprly configured? How can I fix this slowness and unstableness?

What do you have for hardware?

Try Mozilla Firefox as browser (included in SuSE 9.1) and MPlayer for a very descent player...

druisgod is correct though... it surely has something to do with your hardware then Linux itself...

As far as hardware its a P4 1.8ghz, an ecs otherboard, geforce 4 ti 4600, 640mb sdram, 1 gig swap, 7200rpm ata 133 120 gig hard drive, 1-NIC, 1-burner, integrated sound into mobo ac97, adn i tried firefox, same difficulties as mozilla and mplayer won''t play mpgs correct the sound is all weird on mpgs.

It sounds like you're having a lot of problems with Linux -- a lot of problems that a lot of people aren't having Maybe it is a hardware problem.
Regarding speed, I know that my computer ran very slowly with Fedora2 in comparison to how it runs with Mandrake10, which is optimized for Pentiums, whereas Fedora isn't (right? -- I think it's packaged to be usable even by 386s -- somebody correct me if I'm wrong). I'm not sure if it was the optimization that made the difference (cause it sounded like Fedora was doing a lot of disk I/O / swapping), but trying Mandrake, if you haven't already, could speed up your system a bit. I know that eventually, once I become more comfortable with linux, I'll try the Gentoo distribution, which really optimizes/tailors the OS to your system.
As far as sound, what do you mean by "the sound is weird"? Do you just hear a high-pitched noise or static? Because that's the problem I had w/ Mandrake until I changed the default driver it had chosen to use to another one -- I have a SoundBlaster Live 5.1 by the way.

I tried mandrake and hate it, fedora sucks too, I love Suse, I've had these problems with lots of distros, i'm thinking it my mobo, its a 50 dollar piece of crap, as for mplayer, every file type is fine except for mpgs, the sound sounds all disorted, and only with mplayer, its hard to describe the sound, but its bad, my friend is running suse also with the same problem with mplayer i loved mplayer before these problems.

Yeah it could be the mobo. I just changed over a friends windoze box into a linux box and he had an ecs motherboard. I've done over 40-50 linux installs since I started linux/unix 5 years ago and his was the only ecs mobo Ive installed on. I had nothing but problems. Fisrt off, his usb had to be disabled in bios in order to get the thing to boot, and we had to turn auto escd on permanently for some unkown reason. I didn't really figure it out, I found someone who also had the same problem and fixed it.He had a 2.6 gig proc and 1.5 gig of ddr and his box was dogged-azzed-slow. Tell ya what. Login as your user, su to root and pipe dmesg to a file. Post that along with your kernel version, and model number of your mobo and that could help us out a bit more in investigating.

Druisgod

God Save the Penguin

Oh and as for MPlayer, try a uninstall then a reinstall. Also, with MPlayer, you have to be certain that the codec you are using is working well, and that you have all the right audio input and outputs correct.


Druisgod

Ok, that sucks, i really don't want to shell out the money for a new board, but you gotta do what you gotta do, anyway heres the DMESG and for kernel i have a 2.6.4 thats came with suse, my mobo is an ECS P4VXASD2+

Just a quick comment on ECS motherboards: they are the most unreliable pieces of crap I've ever sold (I run a PC parts shop). They're usually fine for 4-5 months, then start crapping out. The failure rate of that brand is unreal.

Wow those drive seek errors look familiar to what I saw on my friends mobo . . . Whats happening there is the read head on your hard drive is going out and attempting to read, and not finding what it wants. It will constantly do this until it times out. (which isn't quickly). This might be causing a huge amount of data traffic and causing all normal reads to have to find a time slot in that mess. This is kind of a crapshoot cause it could be the mobo, the cable, or the drive. . . Any1 have any other insight?

A motherboard could be running your system at sub-par but this probably is not your problem. You may have a really slow FSB and northbridge and you said you had SDRAM, so it is kinda slow. But you just need to adapt. Try to limit applications used at any given time. Getting rid of KDE or GNOME and using fluxbox, blackbox, icewm, or countless other desktops will free up many system resources. KDE and GNOME in particular eat RAM. (Very nice though, if you got the specs :P). The "newbie" distros generally do run slower than the more advanced too. Still crashing shouldnt be an issue. Gentoo is THE hardest distro to install and you have to be a real guru and really know your hardware and the details of Linux to get it up. Don't get me wrong it is very nice, but I wouln't recommend it to many people. Mozilla does take some time to load up as it uses much RAM, but it and Linux itself is very stable. If any process ever hangs you can take care of that, here are some ways:

Usually pressing Ctrl- Alt- Esc turns mouse cursor into skull-and-crossbones which you then just click on an app 'killing' it.

Also, press Ctrl- Alt-F2 and get to non-X shell, do 'ps -u username' and then find process and do 'kill PID#' (whatever your Process ID is.. ex. 'kill 1456'). If you want to use the name instead use the 'killall' command 'killall mozilla' or whatever you want to terminate looking from the 'ps -u username' command. Then Ctrl-Alt-F7 (play around with 'F' keys) should get you back to your desktop.

hope that helps.

What?! This guy is running a 1.8 ghz proc, has 640mb of ram, sdram or ddr sdram, he shouldn't be running slower than his friend running a 400mhz k6-2. How could you suggest to the guy that he needs to lower his expectations and kill some processes? You can't possibly believe that a plain vanilla distro running on this hardware should be slower than a 400mhz k6-2. What you have is a hardware issue, as seen in dmesg. That is what needs investigating. Linux is not about settling.

Druisgod

Name_in_use,

What the hell are you talking about? Are you suggesting that after all the work done by so many talented programmers in the world of open source, that this guy "dumb down" his system? It seems to me that one of the lures of using Linux is it's ability to blow away the competition with it's speed and functionality, along with it's great stability. Yes, there are issues with certain items of hardware but to say it's the fault of his choice of desktop environments is ludicrous. With millions of other people using the same environments, whether KDE or GNOME, on lesser machines and running much faster than this guy, I would suggest he check his HARDWARE and not his SOFTWARE. ECS motherboards seem to work fine with Windows but they suck with Linux.

I would suggest cabling, master/slave relationships of hard drives and CD players. Bus contention is NOT a wonderful thing in the world of computing.

BLUEDUDE,

Check to make sure you are using the correct cable with your hard drive. If you are using a ATA133 type of drive, you'll need the ribbon cable with 80-pins (typically has a blue connector) and the blue side MUST go to the computer motherboard IDE connector. Make sure you're not using a 40-pin connector. Just another idea.

Let us know how it goes.

Good day!

Ok. It would seem he has good hardware i know. But you cant argue with the man if he says IT IS SLOW. Why are you grilling me? I am just trying to help. Many people use these great desktops environments even on very good as oppossed to KDE and GNOME because it does free up resources. Secondly none of us can really tell how good he hardware is, i am just throughing ideas out there. You "newbies" obviously no nothing about processors anyway. One can not just simply compare clock speeds! A 1GHz AMD may run faster than a 2GHz Intel or motorolla for Mac. You guys have no room to complain about me when no of us know the problem, but i provided a least a few possible fixes.

so shut up!