I have had sevarelsuse disks and that has hapend to me I think. I have checked the checksums and I even bought one prevolicy that did not work don't know why. it said it could not see my DVD media even though it was 1 minuit in to booting up or so that's with 3 disks not scratiched and checsums correct? mepis and windows cd's fine

I am 100% thoese disks would work on other machines

then again, yast was broken in many ways...so I just bypass yast for everything and use cli...thanks to slack for teaching me linux.

Old_Fogie i am really impressed

i have never met a guy how is so faithful to an OS like you

as soon as i finish my exams i will start tweaking my distro. either i am still using mandriva or if i switched to slackware or suse as i do not want to mess up my distro now

Thanks for your time and the valuable tips

My Regards

Faithful to slack...yeah like I said in just the few months that I'm using it after so many distro's I found my home.

I had the same issues you had. I couldnt believe Linux was ...well slow. It didnt make sense. I should have done what you did and post about my experience and have others point me in the right direction to slackware for performance. But at least I can say that I did truly try and give other distro's a try.

There are those who just rant on and on about how DistroX is no good, etc and didn't really give it a shot.

And I don't blame you for not messing with the PC. I'd aire on the side of caution too. You're doing the right thing. Ask questions now, prepare for the later.

My Distro's that I watch with a hopeful eye:
-DSL, tho I wish they would change their name.
-SUSE, very close to point and click, but there are some real issues in my mind with Yast. Not for slower pc's, awesome awesome power management. I have to watch SUSE because I am in the business world. There is a high likeliness that in business this is the Linux that I might see more often. So I think it is a good idea to watch what they do and keep up on what they do.
-Mepis, that guys REALLY knows what he is doing for a distro, and what people want. If he'd only go back and really tweak Mepis lite to be for older pc's.
-Slax and Mutagenix. Two awesome slackware based distro's.

Good luck on the exams.

Fogie

Glad to know that i am on the right path.

even if i am using the wrong distro after all it is LINUX and carries the linux spirit although it is somehow slow it has some extraordinary advantages which makes me to stick to it

without changing the idea of tweeking i would like to ask about the enlightenment it seemed to be really fast although i tried it from a live CD which was based on debian which is the reason that did not make me install it.
and when i installed enlightenment on mandriva it was not as efficient as on the live CD

and what about debian and debian based distros and the .deb packages are they as easy to install as .rpm and will i find commands as urpmi in mandriva and yum in fedora for automated downloading and installing of programs and their dependencies

and by the way the first time i read DSL's name i revised it so many times unbelieving what i read so i wish that they change it name too

thank you very much for the good luck i really need it as i was too lazy to study this term

ps. talking of a couple of seconds delayon linux, windows 2000 server once took 15 minutes to boot with active directory the next restart i was reinstalling it.
and without active directory the boot time increases with every boot

.deb packages are easier to install than .rpm. Debian's comprehensive and well managed package management system is it's "killer app"; in comparison urpmi and yum are pale copies.

Not only will Debian's package management system automate downloading and installing of programs and their dependencies, those programs will be WELL INTEGRATED into the overall Debian system when installed, along with sensible INITIAL CONFIGURATION.

For example, if you just do the default installs, any software package installed will automatically be available in the menus of KDE, GNOME, IceWM, Fluxbox, etc...

Debian is a very nice distro, some may say it lacks the polish of other distros; but what it may lack in polish it more than makes up for with APT-Get and Synaptic. Plus the number of available packages is great, last time I remember looking at the number available in Synaptic it was over 25k.

If you want to play around with a Debian system I would recommend Kanotix.


If you want to try a rpm distro I would say give PCLinuxOS a shot. It boots in about the same amount of time as XP and Debian even on my laptop.

Thank you very much craigevil and IsaacKuo for your replies

beside the info. you provided i wanted to know about the tweaking needed to reach maximum efficiency so that a program like konqueror won't take more than a second to load and open office starts in the same time that is needs to start on XP

forgive me for the silly questions but i am sure you the way with newbies

As you may know, Windows "cheats" by pre-loading Office and Internet Explorer. You can acheive a similar effect in Linux, if you really want.

With Konqueror, there's a setting in KDE's Control Center about "performance", where you can configure it to pre-load at least one instance of Konqueror.

With Open Office...well, there's no such integration with KDE. You can place a pointer to Open Office in KDE's startup folder so that an instance of it always loads when you log in. This is not as elegant as having something invisible in the background, though.

Either way, having an instance of an application pre-loaded is no guarantee of an "instant" startup. Unless you have gobs and gobs of RAM, chances are even a pre-loaded application will get offloaded to virtual memory at some point. Still, I notice it reduces the amount of time it takes for Konqueror to pop up.

IMHO, a bigger performance tweak is simply turning off font anti-aliasing, or setting a minimum font size for font anti-aliasing. (Windows actually does this, and it's really annoying because you don't even have the option to turn off the minimum sizes.)

I found debian very easy to update. Installing wasn't a biggy either.

It did crash on first time coming into linux after log-on, but that's a well known bug simply fixed by updating.

I was shocked that "update-all" really did update all and it worked.

It's a matter of preference. I've been using slack dedicated for a month and I can install just as easily now as I did in debian.

Debian pool has a ton of stuff pre-made.

But I've only found DSL to be the fastest clean smooth running debian distro yet for old pc's. Debian picks up and runs on the old pc's, but there's some inherint bloat there IMO. Hopefully others wont take me as distro bashing, becuase I'm not. I liked MEPIS and that was debian.

But for really really old pc's I'm talking here, Debian stripped down on DSL is nice. But I'm only 1 for 2 on DSL on old pc's. I think you can only expect so much out of a 50meg distro

I can tell you tho that when Debian issues a more current release I will definitely give it a try.

Oh open-office too. That's a big political thing.

However from my own experience the KOffice suite and AbiWord are doing fine for me.

what i need to tweak is not only the performance of each program alone but the overall performance of the whole linux system

i guess that the only way possible solution until now is Old_Fogie's post about hdparm and DMA so i will read help and man pages stick to them and keep you informed

but for now i think i have to stick to my books more than to Linux

and thanks to anyone who contributed in this thread.