i have recently installed mandrake linux 10 and its very very slow.
 

I have a duron 1.3ghz and thats not bad so why is it so slow?:newbie: :Pengy:

Did you enable dma transfer mode? Its the most common config to handle this.

How much ram have you got, if you are running KDE (especially with a lot of effects) and are running a few programs at the same time you will want at least 256meg

If you're using KDE, perhaps worth trying a lighter window manager ? - in the interim, always worth disabling any un-necessary services in the MCC.

mandrake is quite slow full stop.

you could try a different window manager, or change distribution :>

For an easier interface and faster, you should use Fedora Core 2 or SuSE 9.1. SuSE is better than Fedora, but a bit complex to install.

Cya!

I cannot disagree more! Until Last spring when I installed Mandrake 10 on my P-III 700, I didn't know what speed with KDE was! It is the 2nd fastest binary distro I have tried (nest to Slackware 10). Its not KDE, not Mandrake, and definitely not kernel 2.6. Therefore, its a config somewhere.

I have ran Mandy 10 on a P-2 350mhz with 160mb ram and it was as tolerable as Windows XP on the same.

The DMA is likely the problem. I just reinstalled on a (new to me) Duron 800 system with 384 mb ram (VIA KT133 chipset). It ran like crap! The benchmarks on a Duron 800 are significantly higher than P-III 700, so I knew that something was wrong. After a bit of googling, I found that enabling generic IDE support as well as the VIA IDE support in the kernel made it revert to NO DMA!

Look through the output of "dmesg" or pore through the /var/log/messages file and see what is happening with your disk controller. It will explicitly show in the boot messages that DMA has been enabled for all drives involved. For example, mine has an ATA100 hard drive and the same for CD burner. The HD has an 80 wire cable so it shows UDMA@100 and the cd burner has a regular 40 wire cable and shows UDMA@33. You should find the same thing (or you could also load hdparm and test it. You should not get speeds of 3 or 4mb/s. It should be much higher if DMA works.

Vector,
I agree with you. These guys are turning this into a big mess.

Ant, do this:

Open console, su to root and use hdparm to probe how is your system configured:

hdparm -I /dev/hda #assuming we're talking about hda

This will list several info about your disk. If you have any monitoring program like gkrellm, load it, do some file copying and see if is there much cpu activity during file copying (it shoudn't).

If dma ins't enabled, issue:

hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda

will enable dma transfer on this disk.

Now, do

hdparm -k 1 /dev/hda

will tell it to keep settings.

Now, enable the highest dma speed for the disk:

This step is kinda risky, because you have to know for sure what speed your disk can handle. If its a 7200rpm, surely you can do:

hdparm -X 69 /dev/hda

and set speed for UDMA100.

Notice that, as vector said, enabling this setting will not yield benefit if you don't use 80pin flat cables. Also, the disk must be alone in the controller or together with another UDMA100 disk. Any slower disk will slow everything with it.

After all this, re-run the file copying test and see what gkrellm says about your cpu.

If everything worked, now you must ensure Mdk will do this every reboot, so you don't have to hdparm every time.

Additionally, you can set Mdk to run as few services/daemons as possible, by going to the setup and disabling everything you don't need. Just make sure you know what you are disabling, so you don't screw things.

I'm not sure if hdparm is installed on a default Mandrake install. You may want to install it with the command:from a terminal window (you'll need to be root - type "su" and enter your root password - this is faster than opening RPMDrake for a tiny program like hdparm). It'll install and you'll be ready to go.

"I'm not sure if hdparm is installed on a default Mandrake install..."

I'd be surprised if it isn't.

Might be, but I can't check, as I'm currently a single-distro guy (changing motherboard/cpu).

Pretty sure hdparm is installed by default. I have used it before on my system and am positive i didn`t have to load it from the install disks.

So, ant123, did you get any good results yet?