Hey people, Ive only used mandrake on and off since 8.0 and only seriously since 9.0. But this past year, I've been experimenting with other distros. Some are slack 9.1, fedora 1, and gentoo GRP. Now, I didn't install gentoo, because there just seemed to be too much stuff to do manually. Fedora wouldn't work with my modem driver(older linuxant driver).

Slack 9.1 installed with no problems. but it didn't have my cdrw setup after the install, and I couldnt adjust the bass and treble controls in aumix.

My main question was that after setting up mandrake 9.1 and to some extent 9.2 to my liking, it seemed to be much faster than slackware at doing most of my daily tasks. Browsing the internet, checking email, and playing music. The most noticeable speed difference was noticed when switching and starting applications. I've read that slack has some i686 optimizations on, and of course mdk is compiled for i586 of course. So why did mandy seem faster? Is it because of pre-fetching? I think its turned on in mandy. Is it just a freak of nature. Everyone touts slack as being slimmed down and really quick. Kind of like a stripped out car for racing compared to an off the shelf sports car. Could it be that slack is starting more daemons on boot? I disable most that are in mandy. I usually start with 12 or so.

Also, i tried the multimedia kernels in both 9.1 and 9.2 and noticed no noticeable speed difference. And if anything it might have been slower. Of course, this was un-scientific, with no gaming fps comparisons or anything. I just read pre-emptive, and low latency and thought. Oh it must be faster.. lol

Anyone wanna comment on this?

I've not noticed any significant difference in these tasks.

The most noticable difference to me is the time from power-on to desktop. And in that category Slack seems much faster to me. But I haven't timed it.

Mandrake does make it much easier to start/stop daemon processes but that is because of using SysV init scripts. You can add that to Slack, I just wish it was standard.

Thanks for the reply. I actually reinstalled slack 9.1 a few days ago. Had some problems this time with the install but I noticed that when I have a zip disk in my drive, then I can add it to fstab when I install. Would you happen to know whether or not this can be done with my second cdrom(cdrw)?

At any rate, when all was said and done slack was a bit faster. I reached this conclusion based on using kde 3.1.4 in both slack and mandy. but I was using keramik in slack, and hi-perf liquid in mandy. Slack did seem a tad more responsive. Again this is unscientific. I did notice that after booting slack used 55mb ram, and mdk about 59mb. I eventually re-installed mdk, since I have final exams coming up and didn't want to spend time trying to get my cdrw and printer(z32 works best with foomatic/lex-fookit) working.

And yeah, slack does boot faster. At least from the point when x comes up and it starts loading kde.

The biggest speed gain in Slackware 9.0-9.1 will be when you recompile the kernel and set your kernel to i686. The default install is usually i386 or i486. Once you recompile you will be able to see the difference. Slack will put MDK in the dirt!! I have recompiled MDK the same way and Slack is still faster. I run dual cpu boxes and Slackware is usually much faster. The reason I run MDK is because I teach it in an A+ course and its a good distro to learn on. Although Slackware 9.1 is almost as easy to install.

I'm in general agree w/ zarathustra674. I've been using MDK exclusively since version 5.3 for my workstations. and about a month ago I switched to Slack. Slack most definitely boots more quickly. I have seen better performance in Slackware 9.1, enough to be noticeable but nothing that would make me say it screamed past MDK. Again nothing timed, just based on daily use.

PDR60 has it right on. If you just install Slackware, and only use pgktool to manage your software, it is optimized for a 486 with no math co-processor function. However, take the time to set up the kernel for your hardware, and compile your own applications Slackware is much faster, and rock solid stable.

I never thought about that, but that is usually the first thing I do when I install a new distro is build a new kernel. So maybe that is why it seems slower for some people. I have 2.6.0-test11 running on all my distros.

Do you fellows add any pre-emptive or low latency patches before recompiling? Just curious. And what about pre-fetching do you do that too? I wouldnt mind, trying slack again, but shew. It really is a bit of work. Not getting to a usable desktip, but getting things configured and installed the way I want.

I've had horrible success compiling apps on mandrake. So thats one of the qualms I had about switching to slack completely. For instance, I tried k3guitune, and cant get a window to come up. It seemed to compile without errors, it might have been something when I did ./configure.

Also, do you guys know if library packages like say, libxine, contain the development libraries for compiling apps that use xine? In mandrake, they're separated. into libxine and libxine-devel.

Thanks people for all the comments.

I used to apply a preemptive patch for my laptop, but I stopped at 2.4.20. I think it would make a difference if you were seriously multitasking, but for me I see no speed difference.

As for the xine libraries, I'm not real sure what yer asking. If you mean in Slackware as opposed to Mandy, then yeah - usually development libraries are seperate (for big apps). That's decided by the coder and not the Linux distro.

For example, if I want to compile gphotoshow and use the xine library I think I need libxine-devel loaded in mandrake(its been a while since I compiled it). I've noticed that in the slack9.1 cd's and on www.linuxpackages.net there is only a libxine. So do you think, that libxine would contain what is needed to comiple an application that uses xine to preview video clips? I use gphotoshow and xine as an example, but it could apply to any programs.

Forgot something, the reason I was asking about the pre-emptive and low-latency patches is that I want to use my computer for an fx processor for guitar. I noticed that in win2k latency is aweful. I can play the guitar and its a sec or two before, I hear the sound through the speakers. lol

I know this is way off topic but...

I had the experience that Slackware seemed much, much faster than Mandrake (both 9.1 versions), but the machines I installed them on had a Celeron and an AMD Athlon processor. I attributed the speed difference to all the crap mandrake runs by default.

If your looking for performance and ease of installing/compiling software then you should look at Gentoo. Gentoo uses Portage/emerge to manage installing software, it resolves dependencies and compiles every application with your hardware specs giving max performance. It does take some time to get a usable system. I used the precompiled binaries for my pIII laptop, then compiled KDE 3.1.4, it loads things like 2 to 3 times faster than my work pIII laptop with MDK 9.2.

The down side is that it takes a long time to compile large apps like KDE. It took something like 36 hours to compile KDE on a 600 meg PIII. But after getting the system up now installing new stuff is a snap, emerge xxapp, it determines dependencies, downloads the source, compiles it and installs it. Works great.

I've given some thought to gentoo, and Ive downloaded the 2 GRP 1.4 discs for my P3. However, it appears to be a bit more complicated than slackware in setting things up so I'll probably wait until my last exams are finished before I tackle anything new.

Installing Slack was easy with the exception of my Lexmark Z32 printer. I looked for drivers on lex's site, but only found the rpm version. In mandy 9.1 I used this driver with the lex-fookit from linuxprinting.org and LPRng. It worked great. However, I couldn't get the rpm to work in slack after I did rpm2tgz.

Everyone says that gentoo is the way to go as far as performance goes. And of course, most people rave about portage. If I were to compile say, xmame in gentoo using portage, how would I compile with say sdl instead of X11 or opengl? Any idea?

Did you run into any problems setting up all your hardware? Do you do all of this manually? Eg cdrw, dvd-rom ect? The sign says member but I'm still a newb relatively. I have a decent book checked out of the library to use in configuring fstab ect.

I'm not sure about selecting windowing environment, I would assume that you would have your system setup on that environment, so it would just compile it for what ever your using.

as for detecting hardware, it was rather easy, i just followed the install document and didn't really have any problems. I did setup a wifi card, my first install was on a laptop and it went smooth.