Everything Loads Slowly
 

We have just installed Mandrake on a Pentium II with 128mb.

We previously used Knoppix and everything was OK.

With Mandrake, it takes forever to open any other program. For example, OpenOffice takes up to a minute to start, with Knoppix it took seconds.

I've searched the forums and read the suggestions regarding Mandrake slowing down over time, but this isn't our problem, it has been slow since the beginning.

Search google for 'linux hdparm'. You should find some relevant results.
By the way, though, I've heard that Mandrake is usually slow.

We've tried this, our parameters are:

/dev/hda:
multcount = 16 (on)
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
geometry = 16383/16/63, sectors = 16514064, start = 0

reading other forums i understand we should only have 10-15 processes running (using ps -e | wc -l)

We have 58

What do we need to do?

I'd advise you NOT to monkey around with hdparms directly...

Instead set it up the "Mandrake" way by editing /etc/sysconfig/harddisk and uncommenting the indicated lines.

This prevents certain data corruption problems on some drives while still giving you the added speed.

BTW: 128MB is extremely "light" for Mandrake.

KDE is a memory hog, eaten by an elephant.

You may want to try a lighter DM until you install more RAM.

Try remove alle Microsoft fonts you may have installed-

Worked for me.