Slow slow red hat 9
 

Installed Linux yesterday for the first time (RH9) on an old but reliable clunker (P2,64MB,3GB)...
and it is almost unusablely slow. It takes about 3 minutes to open Openoffice say, and the screen redraw is really inconsistent - ie sometimes it gives you 20 'ghost' images of a window if you drag it.
Given that the machine ran that big company's 1998 OS pretty efficiently earlier yesterday, i'm wondering what to do??

64 of RAM isn't so much. Have you created swap partitions? If you did, how big is it?

it sounds like you don't have the computer capabilities to make RH 9 to work..here is what i would suggest;
look for ar 7.x release of RH (if you would like to stay with that) or go with a debian based distro like Libranet which is still easy to install but is smaller and faster on slower pc. or you can try Vector which is slackware base and is small and faster on pc also. depending on how new you are to linux i would suggest going with libranet or vector but if you are still brand new i would go with the RH 7.x distro.

**edit**
just found this on the redhat.com site. it might help you
http://www.redhat.com/software/linux/technical/

add more ram, or create additional swap. I'd go w/ the former. ram is cheap nowadays. I have rh9 on a p2 w/ 192mb of ram and it flies. (yes it runs x too) turn off unneeded services. sendmail, atd, named, etc...

chkconfig [runlevel] [off|on] [service] to manage services

chkconfig --list will show you all the services configured to start in each runlevel.

type man [service] for info on what the service does.

thanks for the different advice i'll go and investigate...

I too find RH9 slow, compared with Windows XP. I have a dual boot, which windows xp loads quicker. Opening openoffice.org in rh9 take 15 to 30 secs to load!.
My system is a 3.10Ghz P4, IC7-G Max II motherboard 1GB memory, Seagate 120GB SATA HD(RAID). I left 6GB to install rh9, and left rh9 to set up the partions automatically, install GRUB as my boot loader. I haven't been able to get the sound working, but I have got the intel onboard gigabit lan working. I haven't installed any further drivers for the SATA RAID (silicon image 3112A) only what is built into the kernal 2.4.20-8smp. Also does anyone know how to get mozzila to automatically dialup using the modem when required!

OpenOffice is awful to open on Linux. It just can't get any slower. I don't understand the reason for it, because if you download OpenOffice for Windows, it flies compared to OpenOffice for Linux. I use Koffice instead for Linux :)

I'll load RH on my good machine instead... but i tried to reboot the old machine back to Win98 and failed?? It is set up as pure Linux (one partition ext2). Because the floppy doesnt work, i changed the bios to boot from cd ... and it stalls at the first step having told me "Boot from ATAPI cd-rom: " Any ideas?

Hi guys,
I agree RH is slow, but (in my opinion) is because when installing RH, it doesn't configure the installtion to the optimum performace of the HW...
It's a classic to see in demsg (at boot-up) assuming bus speed at 33Mhz, ovveride with idebus=xx.
When I install a new system I have to configure the HDD to use DMA and other stuff using the hdparm command.
Ofcourse installing a system with little or no SWAP, that causes the slowup as well.
P.s. I have an old laptop P90, 24MB ram, 80MB hdd, RH runs perfectly in text mode, loading a heavy GUI takes for ever (5+ minutes), using other (lighter) GUI's {FVWM i think} was much faster.

Cheers
Ginux

Is Redhat 9.0 i686 optimized? I think so. I was using JAMD, it's pretty good but won't run on anything less then a PII. (It's based on Redhat 9.0 i686 optimized). Slackware is pretty fast, I think 8.1 runs smooth on a 386 processor. I still use Slackware 3.5 in a 386 laptop I have (8 ram, 75mhz and IceWM).

Hi,
Ive tried many linux distros (and have even more to go) and red hat 9 seems to be the worst on my AMD XP1800+ 256mb ram box. What is meant in the above about idebus=xx and the dma with hdparm? Is it because PH9 is not optomized for amd? eg: With debian, X and KDE running, OpenOffice1.0.2 takes ~13secs to load and Kylix about 7 seconds. With RH9 i get a suprize when openoffice pops up because I had forgotten I started it and opened kwrite instead. It takes on average 45 seconds and Kylix will hang for a minute on the loading screen (which blocks the use of other windows).
Is there any way I can make it run a little faster. I have compiled my own 2.4 kernel with amd support however that only make a little speed jump (and I have 1.5gb of swap too)

Thanks

I've just upgraded the kernel to 2.4.22 from 2.4.20-8, and RH9 is much faster, although I have a few BUGS/FAILED devices on loadup to sortout.