Hi,

I played with several distributions since I am interested in linux - RedHat Shrike, Mandrake9.2, Debian, Ubuntu Breezy - and installed them on several machines.

All mentioned distros worked well, but I found at least one machine for each distribution, that showed the following behaviour:

Within the installation, the whole setup speed begins to suffer. It seems, that the CD/DVD ROM is getting very, very slow. After finishing the setup (often more than 8 hours), the systems works without errors but extreme slow, too. In kds, e.g., it takes more than a mionute to open the k-menu, starting a terminal program takes two or three minutes and so on.

I found no errors, and I cannot find a relation between the affected computers (they range from a very, very old laptop to new bought systems from the shelf, no special or tricky hardware). It seems not to be kernel specific and playing with boot parameters (noapic, nolapic, ...) doesn't change anything, Other distributions work very well on affected machines.

I know, this is a very unspecific question, but I would be very, very glad, if
someone can point me the direction, where to search the speed-break?

Hardware config of that computer.
Setup details like Swap space on harddisk.
A post of top (console).

Hallo Keruskerfürst,

I don't have an affected system running at the moment. Had to intall a system quickly on a friends PC today and found the problem with ubuntu breezy. After some triing, I deleted everything and installed debian.
That is, why I cannot deliver live output like top.

The todays system is a AMD Sempron 2800+ mounted on an asrock mainboard with 256 MB DDR RAM.
Storage: 80 GB HDD and a DVD, both devices are master on different busses, I tried HDD as master and DVD as slave on first bus, too.
I partitioned:
hda1: 10 GB ext3 (/)
hda2: 10 GB unused (in case, my friend wants an additional windows)
hda3: 1 GB (swap)
hda4: logical
hda5; 59 GB (/home)

The installation procedure worked normal until it started fetching the packages to be installed (installation from DVD). Some packages went fine, but at 6%, always with "Lade gnupg" (german installation), it started to be extreme slow (about 5 minutes per package - small packages like ifupdown. I did hdparm durong the installation process (enabled dma and so on) but nothing changed. On the terminal, I found, that every operation, that deals with the DVD, was very slow (ls, hdparm, ...)

Debian failed on amy fathers AMD XP2800+. Two IDE HDDs, one IDE DVD. ASUS mainboard. He installed knoppix on his machine and is happy.
Red Hat did the same behavoiour years ago on an Intel Laptop. Something with 250 MHz cpu clock... Really old. There mandrake worked fine.
I remember that I did a top on this laptop, but I found nothing. No process took too much resources, the machine was pretty busy with idling.

That's my problem. I found no bottleneck and no rule.
My stomach says something with the ide bus / drives, but I don't know...