Hello,

I start use linux Red Hat 7.1 with kernel 2.4.2
but when i use this OS my pc is more slow.
Many times for starting one application
or when i swap the windows.
Purhaps my pc is more old with mother card
asus tv-p4 with ciryx 166Mz, 32Mram, video card
diamond S3 2Mram.Or another idea on the shell i can see
the kernel is 2.4.2 but i586 or my rpm for
Red Hat 7.1 and another rpm is i386.

Thank you for you help.

RH starts a lot of services you probably dont need on startup so you should disable them. Also recompile your kernel to make it optimized for your system and smaller so it takes up less memory.

After doing that it should go quite faster. Also theres a hdparm trick to make your HD go faster, although i fscked up my disk that way so i dont reccomend it unless yoy are sure your disk can handle it.

Hope that helps

-nskl

Which services doesn't he need? How is a newbie like myself (and possably the original poster of this topic) supposed to know which are which?

Or for that matter, how to shut them off and keep them off for the next re-boot?

Is there a newbies guide to streamlining your older HW Linux Box?

On my RedHat 7.2 system, I can find out exactly what each service is by reading the tops of the scripts that are located in the "/etc/init.d" directory.

You can shut off services that are currently running using the "/sbin/service" command

You can prevent services from starting next time by using the "/sbin/chkconfig" command

see the man pages for details, example:

man chkconfig

Here is an example script for shutting off some extra services:

#!/bin/sh
/sbin/service atd stop
/sbin/service sendmail stop
/sbin/service crond stop
/sbin/service anacron stop
/sbin/service rawdevices stop
/sbin/service apmd stop
/sbin/service ipchains stop
/sbin/service iptables stop
/sbin/service autofs stop
/sbin/service nfslock stop
/sbin/service isdn stop
/sbin/service sshd stop
/sbin/service netfs stop
/sbin/service portmap stop
/sbin/service wine stop

/sbin/chkconfig atd --level 345 off
/sbin/chkconfig sendmail --level 2345 off
/sbin/chkconfig crond --level 2345 off
/sbin/chkconfig anacron --level 2345 off
/sbin/chkconfig rawdevices --level 345 off
/sbin/chkconfig apmd --level 2345 off
/sbin/chkconfig ipchains --level 2345 off
/sbin/chkconfig iptables --level 2345 off
/sbin/chkconfig autofs --level 345 off
/sbin/chkconfig nfslock --level 345 off
/sbin/chkconfig isdn --level 2345 off
/sbin/chkconfig sshd --level 2345 off
/sbin/chkconfig netfs --level 2345 off
/sbin/chkconfig portmap --level 2345 off
/sbin/chkconfig wine --level 2345 off
/sbin/chkconfig sgi_fam off
/sbin/chkconfig xinetd --level 2345 off

How do I recompile my kernal??

How did that question get in this thread?

There is a HOWTO at the Linux Documentation Project:

http://www.tldp.org/

Note: You don't usually have to compile your own kernel because kernel modules allow the kernel to be more dynamic.

If you can get ahold of some more memory for your machine do that ASAP. I know you have an older machine with harder to find memory components but if you have a relative that works at a friendly company you might ask them to ask the IT department if they have old memory sitting around. Some places are happy to give it away. If you can't do that consider visiting the usenet group for your local area (see groups.google.com, my local group is chi.forsale, if you live in a big city you might find a group for it or at least a group for you state) and posting a wanted ad. Or visit eBay.

Of course you might be able to live with it. If you are only testing things than test away. But personally if that was all the memory I had I'd go with an older version of a distribution that doesn't go all out on everything. Something like Slackware or OpenBSD. Or, worst come to worst, I'd go to Windows 95. As much as I wouldn't like to do that I'm realist and that amount of memory with Linux using a GUI would simply be far too annoying for me to actually use.

In the long run it might be far cheaper just to look for a machine that uses SDRAM. Companies are giving Pentium 2 266Mhz machines with 128mb RAM and 3gb hd to a school I donate my time to... I'm sure if you look around you could get a decent machine for cheap (I'm assuming you live in America, I realize that in other parts of the world getting computer parts that we consider outdated here is very hard).

Can someone help me...I have a PII 450 with 256 MB Ram...20 gig haddrive. first 10 gigs is for win2000 and last 10 gigs is for RedHat. Win2000 runs so much faster than Linux on my machine...I have tried removing unneeded services from Linux but it is still slow. The harddrive goes crazy everytime I try running a program and when I move windows around I see 'ghost' images...in addition, surfing the net is so much slower when using netscape on Linux versus IE in Windows...what can I do to speed up/optimize linux?? I am a newbie...

#1 thing is to take a look at hdparm. Right now your hard drive may not be using DMA. That really really slows things down.

Read the hdparm manpage and then run a test on your current configuration (remember to replace /dev/hda with whatever your hard drive is below):

First lets get the current settings:
hdparm /dev/hda

Now get the performance numbers:
hdparm -Tt /dev/hda

Now lets set some things (read the man page, save any open files, maybe run "sync" as root, you may loose data):
hdparm -d 1 -u 1 -m 1 -c 3 /dev/hda

Check the settings:
root@notebook:~# hdparm /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
multcount = 1 (on)
I/O support = 3 (32-bit w/sync)
unmaskirq = 1 (on)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
nowerr = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 8 (on)
geometry = 1222/255/63, sectors = 19640880, start = 0
busstate = 1 (on)

Test the speed again:
hdparm -Tt /dev/hda

There may not be much of a difference depending on how RedHat does IDE things these days. Our RedHat servers mostly have 3ware IDE RAID cards in them so I don't know what level of optimization is in the box for regular IDE devices.

Next make sure Linux is using all 256mb of your RAM (running top should give you some details). The net may be slow if you haven't loaded up the compression modules for PPP if you are doing dialup. If you are using broadband it should be fast. You should try Mozilla. It takes a bit of time to startup but once it is running it is very fast.

Finally make sure you run rhn_register and use up2date to get your system up to date. There may be performance improvements to be had...

For me the hdparm thing doesnt work when trying to change DMA modes, so if you get no speed boost after doing hdparm -X 69 /dev/hdx then you should pass a line in your LILO or Grub config file like so:

type dmesg | grep hd to see what ide the hard drive is on, as well as notice vital information.

once you find out what ide your hard drive is on (ide0, ide1, etc) just add a line to your grub, lilo file like

ide0=ata66

NOTE!!!!
66 works for all the dma modes so even if you use ATA/133 you can use the ata66 setting and you will get full speed. I for example am getting 40MB/sec on my drive (NO RAID TOO!!!)