New to Linux - Slower than XP?
 

I just switched to Linux. I am honestly a Mac user but have recently sold both my PowerMac and my main PC and am stuck with a PII 233. Originally I ran XP on it and was actually quite amazed with how well it ran on there. I mean a 233 is the MINIMUM to run XP which if I know MS that means don't try it. Anyway after a bit it did get a bit sluggish, nothing major but I wanted to try Linux so thought why not.

Now I'm stuck. I got a copy of Slackware 10 (the new one, not sure if it's 10 though) anyway it ran horribly slow. I was going back to XP. It won't reinstall. Then I was in a frenzy. Went out and bought a copy of Suse 10.something and its even worse. I mean it is barely usable. Can anyone please tell me what's wrong? I got linux in the first place cause I have always heard it "brings life to old hardware" but XP was running laps around this.

Stats:
PII 233
320 Meg Ram
10 gig HD
Network Connection through USB as it would not recognize my network card, or either of TWO dialup modems I installed! It has not been fun, I can tell you.

Thank you so much. I know it seems people like me only run to support forumns when we need help and never to help others, but I honestly do spend time on the Mac forumns alot and do help some people for what ever it's worth. I do TRULY appreciate your help.

Well, there's a host of possible reasons ... with the
amount of RAM but an old CPU you may find that the
start-up time of apps is long ... check your logs
in /var/log and the output of dmesg to see whether
there's any errors in the boot-process


check what
hdparm /dev/hdX
(where X is the letter corresponding
to your HDD, most likely a) has to say.
If it says
using_dma = 0 (off)
try running (as root)
hdparm -d /dev/hdX to turn it on.

Run a test with both settings:
hdparm -Tt /dev/hdX
and compare the results.

Even though you have lots of RAM try running
a more light-weight windowmanager (e.g. fluxbox
or windowmaker or IceWM)...


Cheers,
Tink

Well I'll tell ya I am new to Linux too, but one thing I have already learned/ been taught is that some modems and other things only do part of what they need to do themselves and the other part is done by Windows in an emulation thingy.

Billy

I personally have an old AMD K62 400 MHz computer with 320 meg of RAM and am running Slackware 10.0. I did have Windows XP Pro on there, but just running my antivirus and firewall alone made it dreadfully dreadfully slow. I put Slackware on it and granted it is by no means a speed demon, but I have the general impression that it runs circles around XP.

Now that being said, I wasn't running either GNOME or KDE. You can, but they're pretty heavyweight desktop environments and are going to be using up the majority of your system resources. Did you try one of the lighter weight window managers such as Fluxbox or Windowmaker? They may not be as fully featured as their swiss army knife desktop environment counterparts, but once you get used to them you may find that you really didn't need all the features that a desktop environment offers. I personally run XFCE 4 on my Slackware machine and absolutely love it. It did take me a while to get accustomed to the changes, but I really don't miss either GNOME or KDE. It's basically a question of what you really need, and nobody can answer it for you except you (although some will try!) though we can offer our best input :-)

Also, you didn't mention how you set up your box. What did you use for a partitioning scheme? I assume you included some swap space on your hard drive, correct?

May I ask what kinds of programs you were running on your computer? As for applications, you should look into some of the lighter weight programs such as Firefox (instead of just straight Mozilla) for a browser and Abiword (instead of OpenOffice.org Writer) because of their being more streamlined for doing just one thing and doing it well vs. offering you everything and the kitchen sink.

That said, if you really want to use OpenOffice (which I admittedly do), you can make it significantly more usable through following these steps:

1. start up OpenOffice
2. click the Tools menu
3. click Options
4. under the OpenOffice.org section on the left side, select Memory
5. under the Graphics cache subsection on the right side, change the Use for OpenOffice.org setting to be more than just 9 MB (I personally set it to 33)
6. click OK

This has really sped up the loading time and response time for me, though once again it's not going to be any sort of speed demon. As for Suse, although I really do like their distribution I think it's more resource-intensive than Slackware. It is going to run slower on your system than Slack, but it's also going to automate settings and such for you much more than Slackware will. You could argue on for days about the merits of each distro's philosophy, but once again I think it really comes down to your specific needs. Nobody can tell you what YOU personally need, that has to be up to you. If you like automated configuration better than manual, Suse may be the way to go. I haven't used it since Suse 8.0 so I don't recall what it offers for window managers, but I'd imagine that it includes a fairly good selection of lighter window managers as Suse is pretty well known for including a plethora of software. I'd cringe at trying to use Suse with either KDE or GNOME on a PII 233, but if you're a glutton for punishment then go for it! You could always scale down the graphics/effects if need be, though I'd highly recommend at least trying out Fluxbox, Windowmaker, XFCE, or something similar to see if you like them.

One other thing you might want to consider doing is recompiling the kernel and removing some of the options that you don't need as well as optimizing it for your specific CPU architecture. I know this may seem like a daunting task, especially if you're new to Linux, but there are some great resources on the Internet (with several great ones right here, just check the Slackware forum; there're a couple of stickies about recompiling kernels). Since everything has to interact with the kernel, streamlining it a bit can really produce some nice performance increases. This might be a tip for later on down the road though, one you can use after you get more accustomed to Linux.

That's all the advice I can think of for now, but I hope some of it helped!

Thank you all for your advice. One thing I've been wonder about though is how do you change gui's in suse? In slackware it's easy, just click the session button. But I've looked all over suse and can't figure it out short of some major terminal commands which I haven't really found either and even if i did I wouldn't know how to use them.

for your questions it might be better to give slackware another try. I run slackware, but by no means am I trying to have a bias opinion to tell you what YOU should run.

I gave SuSE a try about a month ago after running Slackware for about a year and SuSE just seemed to cut-and-dry.

By that I mean after installing SuSE it gave me the impression "here is your operating system, use it this way". I went back to Slackware in favor of its ease of customization. I can tell you if I had been running SuSE for a year and where to be trying out Slackware, I would have probably gone back to SuSE.

It all depends on what you want to stick with. Distrobutions go different ways in the process of getting things setup. Each in thier own way and order, most noticably in where files are located.

For me I stuck with Slackware in favor of its performance and community. Yes, Linux can be a let-down at first try, but you should try to understand how it works while your using it. Its all gradual. I find new things to do everyday and keep track of them in a few .txt files I have printed out for refrence. From what I have learned so far, linux can add years of use to what can be setup as a desktop computer. As far as I can tell, my next computer purchase wont be until well into the arrival of the 64 bit being mainstream hardware. Never again will I have to let a newer faster operating system tell me when I need a new computer!

why push the car when you should be driving it

In all fairness, if you really want to go back to xp, find a 98 boot floppy


boot to the floppy


type fdisk /mbr
hit enter


re-install XP, it will work.


although if you invest some time in linux, you will find it to be far more powerful and customizable than xp. the only reason I run any MS shit is an addiction to games that wont run on linux. (so I have XP on one of my 5 computers)

old hardware
 

The oldest hardware i've run linux on, was Redhat 9 on a PII-400. That runs awesome, and i'm even running Gnome, and it feels just as responsive as on my main machine (athlon 1600). but i know that there is a world of difference a the pentiums and a PII, so here's my advice, try out Gentoo. The way it works is that Gentoo lets you install EVERYTHING from source (if you want to). Compiling everything for your machine, and at the same time leaving out all the extras you don't need, can really help your system performance. That being said, installing your whole OS from source is a little scary, but on the Gentoo website there's VERY thorough documentation you can print our that takes you through EVERY step of the process. This is definitely the way to go for anyway who wants the best performance that linux can give them.

so really, whatever YOU can get running decently well on your system, and ENJOY using, go for it. Gentoo is great for performance minded linux users. but 2Kpro can run decnet on modest hardware too. sorry this post was so angsty.

To select a different window manager in Suse, logout of your current session. In the login menu, there will be a button to click, i think it simply says "Menu", and it will have a few different "Session Types" to choose from, assuming you installed the other window managers.

-myk