Hi, I just installed the Red Hat 9 on my PII 400Mhz and, if the applications are not extremly responsive, it becomes worse as soon as I start opening several programs: OpenOffice Writer, Mozilla, Xpdf plus a CD player, and the system keep swaping (the HD led don't even stop lighting).

I have 128MB in the box, I know it's not enough. I'm planning to buy a 512MB SDRAM, but I want to know if I'll feel a real difference while launching applications, or if I should necessarily downgrade the GUI and/or the kernel, for getting a lightning-fast system ??

Thanx

R1

By the way, I use Gnome...

With that many applications, downgrading won't make much difference. Go with the ram.

i may get a slap for saying this but downgrade the kernel, or switch to mandrake to get a faster system.

i run mandrake 9.1 on 300 PII and i flys, redhat is slower than mandrake. Upgrade the ram, but it may not help. It really depends on all the hardware u have and what config u go lx runnin in.

I don't understand what difference can a distribution make for speed... A kernel, yes, a GUI too, but a distrib... I don't see. If you can explain me...
However, I order the RAM. Thanx for the tips !!

Some distros enable a lot of ram-hogging things by default, but of course you can turn them off. Older distros will work faster, being designed for older computers.

OK!
I tried some ps -A command to check all the processe running, and indeed, they're quite a lot... How can I know what does each one, considering the fact that their name is not always that much explicit ??

And if it's logical that an older distrib has less feature than a new one (lighter kernel and so on...), arae they more likely to be less stable than the brand new one ??

Try 'top', or try ps with other options ( man ps, ps --help ).

Your main problem with getting an older distro is that the stuff is old. It may not be fully compatible with your hardware. And, if, say, all the apps you're running require new stuff to run, you install it all, and you're almost back where you started with too much stuff running.

use xfree 3.4 or whatever it is instead of xfree 4.3...you'll gain quite a speed boost. also, try using icewm or xfce (lighter window managers...not sure if they're on the redhat 9 disc or not, but it should be easy to find an rpm) instead of gnome...they won't attempt to use so much ram. good luck.

Thanx a lot, guys !