Hello everyone!
I'm looking for the ways to increase speed of my OS.
On of the ways that I see is to recompile new 2.6 kernel
and put it instead of my 2.4 kernal. The questions are:
Is there stable version of 2.6, and how stable that is?
How much faster will my comp run with 2.6?
How do I mesure this speed?
What are the other ways to make it go faster?

Thanks for your time

Hi there...

Considering that 2.6 versions are still
running in "test" I wouldn't recomend it
for every day use. However, you can
streamline your current kernel, and more
importantly, remove unncecessary services
that might be running :)

How slow is your machine? ;)
How much RAM have you got,
which distro are you running,
why haven't you been to the
local Linux User Group Meeting
yet? :D


Cheers, and best regards from Lower Hutt,
Tink

Yeah, what Tinkster said. A quick fix would be to possibly try a different distro. Slack is nice and fast, but arguably difficult to use. I hear good things about Vector Linux though. I think it's an easy to use version of Slackware.

Your info says you're running RedHat, which isn't really a very fast distro, especially when running Gnome. Thus another fix may be to switch window managers. You could try WindowMaker, it's nice when you learn how to use it, but I don't think it comes with RedHat anymore. Fluxbox is another good one.

Also, recompiling the kernel to better suit your machine tends to work well when you do it right. I don't know if that would cause any conflicts with the RedHat auto-update program(if you're using it) though. You can get the latest version at www.kernel.org. Like Tinkster said, it's recomended to stay with the latest stable version. But I don't see anything wrong with trying 2.6 if you're feeling daring, or you know what you're doing. I don't think it has any features that are worth the possible trouble though.

(Edit) Yay! Me 30th post. *crawls back into cage*

There's a fair chance that you have some services running in the background that you don't need - you might want to stop some of these services from starting ? - in Red Hat 9 - open a command line - then type:

su -

(su with a space then a dash)

then type your root password - then type

chkconfig --list | less

this will give you a complete listing of services for each run level - to concentrate on run level 5 - ie graphical mode

chkconfig --list | grep 5:on

To stop a service from starting do: (for example)

chkconfig httpd off

(this will stop apache from starting in run levels 2,3,4,5)

same "syntax" applies for stopping other services from starting.

thanks everyone!

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Tip #2 worked well for me.

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