I guess what I'm looking for is better memory usage/efficiency.

Before going back to slack10.1, I tried ubuntu on this computer and it ran slower than Win2k. And that was using Xubuntu, which purports to be lighter than its full fledged cousins.

On ubuntu this computer took 7-9 minutes to boot up. When it did boot up, for some reason I kept getting occasional kernel panics after setting up ndiswrapper for my wlan card. Windows took 5-6 minutes to boot, including programs in the system tray loaded and ready to go.

Now it takes 2 minutes to boot up, including wlan setup and user login.

However, what I'd like is for pretty much all userland software to run faster. Most computers have enough hdd space on them, but it's not the same story with CPU and/or RAM. Just ask a family member who doesn't know much about computers. They'll say they have lots of free memory available... when they're referring to hdd and not ram usage.

The application I'm mostly worried about is firefox. For some strange reason, it's extremely slow. I've tried using it on other computers in the same range (CPU, RAM) and it runs faster on them. Right now, I type faster than the characters appear on the screen... and I'm around 25-30wpm. Could be related to javascript handling, cuz it's been always slow on pages with lots of javascript on them. But only on this computer

One solution would be to switch to another browser... but when creating pages and testing others, it's just not possible for me.

Any ideas? I've just found out about slackmatic, emerde and portpkg, so package management is pretty much covered now.

you mentioned your cpu runs at 500mhz, but what kinda cpu is it??

My webserver runs on a 400Mhz PII w/ 128 Mb of RAM. It probably wouldn't be able to handle a whole bunch of connections at once, but it runs just fine for what I use it for. Trimming down the kernel to house only what you need it to, makes a pretty big difference (it did for me at least). Also, make sure there's not a lot of processes running in the background that you don't need. You can go to /etc/rc.d and and take away the execute permission on anything you don't want to load at boot.

regards,
...drkstr

I read Xeelee's post twice. I think this needs a bump out to its own thread. If I'm correct in interpreting his desires, his system is running slow. (However, the post is pretty confusing.)

In general, Slack and all the Linuxes have good system overhead and everything sleeps when it's not being used. His Compaq is networked, however, and he says Firefox runs slow. Maybe first order of business is to get new hardware, like a new used $5 netgear ethernet card.
--vonSt

For memory efficiency and lower cpu overhead you won't find anything better than Slackware. Maybe Gentoo but tell me on how many days you might get it installed and working.
I hate to say this but, my dear paisano looks like what you need is a new computer

raska: aaah yes, I'm working on that new computer. But that won't happen for a while. Nice dig at gentoo :P Most people I've seen use it have it installed on bleeding edge computers... which they then use for gaming on windows.

vonst: I'm still trying to work out exactly what I'm trying to say, but thanks for the suggestion of a US$5 netgear card. Problem is, I'm not able to make a run of ethernet from router to computer. That's why I must use a wlan card. Apologies if I made the post confusing, but it wasn't my intention.

dkstr: Working on that right now

win2ksux: It's an AMD K6 500MHz (running at 476MHz. eh).

Now, it's easy to say I need to get a new computer and all that but... think about it. Not everyone has money to get a new computer, if they're even able to get one. Here I'm lucky enough to have a well-paying job that helps me get what I'd like for my family and myself.

I'm just trying to get some more life out of old hardware, like most of us here.

Firefox takes forever to load because of the library linking at runtime. This can be speeded up by compiling it statically, but then it needs about 500MB of RAM to run in! I mean apart from whatever RAM you need.
Have you tried using minimo or the GtkEmbed browser?
Of course firefoy also uses GTK2 which also needs a few seconds to load. Plus if you are using python apps you will see slow loading of those apps.
It will help to keep system usage low if for your basic desktop(window manager, panel, etc) you use only non-GTK2, non-python apps.

then you might benefit by moving to an i586 distribution (slackware is optimized for i686 CPUs)... or if you don't wanna leave slackware, then perhaps recompile your core apps for i586... don't forget to make your kernel i586... as for firefox, when recompiling it for i586, you could kill two birds with one stone and strip it down somewhat (by eliminating unnecessary stuff)... personally, i wouldn't use slackware on i586s unless i had to...

Uh oh, python is known to be slow, is it? I'm glad to find this out, I have been working on a project and was planning on writing the GUI front end in python (the gui would actually be rendered with Mozilla's gecko engine. IE. a web browser just like firefox, but without all the features). Maybe I should find a better solution? I just figured python would be better then PHP since I'm an OOP person. Any ideas on what would be most efficient?

Sorry this was off topic.
...drkstr

You should look at what I've been doing with mini-mozilla stuff.
First I've found a simple way to compile the minimo browser sources for GTK1 from mozilla, firefox or thunderbird sources.

Also, I looked around at projects based on the gecko engine, including the 'Light' browser and skipstone. I found that early versions of skipstone would compile under any version of mozilla and only need the gtkmozembed headers. The sources from 0.1 to 0.3 are very sparse and get reorganized each time, but they are pretty easy to understand and probably do some of what you need using just GTK-1.2 libs.

Have a look here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...rojects/Chico/

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...cts/MinimoG12/

Great thread. I'm probably not up to the competence level of most of the contributors here, but this definitely hits my interest area.

I'd say slimming down comes high on the priority list of the slackuser, a similar to Gentoo (and indeed LFS) user, though not as bad :-D.

Myself, I'm almost always on command line and only go to X when I need to view images (currently trying to find the right combination of MPlayer framebuffer options to do this), so it's natural I'd want to get rid of the X stuff, and slim down that way.

However, it was when I saw Geexbox, that I started to really wonder about slimming down. I'd say it fits close (probably too close) to what drkstr originally mentioned, a utility installation - something that anybody can come up to and activate (acutely limited of course, but desgned with only one function in mind). It's sits 16M on a hardrive, and I'm kind of experimenting to see what can be done with it. When I say it, I really mean MPlayer of course, because that's the bones of Geexbox.

I also downloaded Zenwalk just now. I'll see what it's like, but an initial glance at the forums says it's fast which brigns me to my initial reason posting: surely at some point, slimming down too much causes decreases in speed. Where is that point? Sure if HD space is your total priority, doesn't matter that much, but I'd say speed and heat and energy consumption could equally be the priority, so in effect, you're willing to keep you HD "bloated" so as to fine tune speed aspects. Maybe that's what Zenwalk does, I'll see.

Eh, didn't realize about slack being optimized for i686 cpus. Oh well.

I've downloaded and installed emerde, I'll see how that works out. Any suggestions on i586 distros? Remember that there are still tons of computers out there that fit this category, and some of this information could be useful when you encounter one... I'm mostly thinking of Mexico here. People do try to install WinXP on their old PII box.

Having it running quickly and stable solves the question of what to do with this here puter when I get a new one (read: not throw it away). If there's linux running on it when a family member takes it, that means one less puter I have to give support for

gnashley: I'm thinking soon there'll be a diet-firefox project in the spirit of diet-nmap. I just feel it in my bones. Thanks for the tip on the browsers too

stabu: you're just ahead on me when using X. I've tried to work without X, but I've found I'm just not efficient working without a GUI. Oh well

Slackware is OPTIMIZED for an i686 machine, but all packages are compiled in such a way that allows them to still run on an i486 or i586 machine.

The major ideas have already been hit -- strip extra docs, unneeded locale information, and man/info pages (is the man utility still installed? ). If you compress the installation with unionfs after this, it will take care of duplicate files. Also you won't gain much space by gzipping kernel modules, for instance. It made virtually no difference in size when I stopped doing that.

The minimal (required) module for my live-cd, which I am still whittling on, went from 529MB to 165MB when compressed. And I am not excluding the documents mentioned above.

Also, drkstr, I did see your post on the Slax forums about this, but couldn't find my password so I gave up and didn't reply

yes, i know... the point is simply that it won't run optimally on an i586... so you aren't really getting the most bang for your buck with slackware on an i586 unless you recompile the living crap out of it... it's just an observation...

BTW, i'm basing this on personal experience also, as i did in fact do the slackware on an i586 thing a couple years ago and was impressed by the performance gains i obtained by switching to an i586 distro for that particular box... i don't remember which distro it was (maybe the i586 version of crux?), but it's beside the point either way....

on a side note: i hope to see slackware drop the i486/i686 scheme and move toward an i586/i686 scheme in a not-so-distant release...