RH 9 is noticably slower than both MDK 9.1 and SuSE 8.2 and too many things to tweak to make it usable for average desktop user.

For newbies forget about RH use MDK instead or even better SuSE if it is within your reach.


Have fun :-)

well, i didnt post this as a redhat vs mandrake flaming post, but now it is, lol.

now i know its not my system, and its the distro. Im sticking with mandrake, upgrading it to 9.1 as soon as my ebay cds come in. i was thinking rh 9 will be faster than mdk 9, but i guess not. thanks guys.

I have found RH9 to be worthless. If I want to change the background color of my terminal, I can't for some reason even logged in as root.

The SMP kernel is broken w/ RH9 on my Dual Proc Machine even though I think it has something to do with initrd.

Compile times are attrocious.

Oh and did I mention it is slow. I am going to stick w/ 7.3 since that was their last good release.

I agree to that rh 9 is way slower than some other distroz.
I installed it on my Dell Latitude 1.13gHz 256RAM machine, and it is waaay slower than when i ran Debian Woody. Even glxgears had a throughput of about 700 frames compared to 1200+ on Debian with the same Driver for my Gforce2go 32MB display adapter. It's wierd.

Red Hat 9.0 is just outrageously SLOW>
it actually crawls afet i have opened Mozilla, evolution and a editor.

I am a red hat pro but these days i really can't stand my choice.
My network has windows 2000 and it works like charm on all the systems.
BUT Red Hat 9.0 is incredibly slow.



-----------
Akshay
P4, 128 MB ram.

I'm currently using Red Hat 9, i've been using Red Hat since the version 5.2...

Red Hat 9 runs a little bit slower than the older versions, almost unnoticable you just need to know what your doing.... a little tweaking of the kernel and you'll see a significant speed difference...

We are Linux users.... and if your really into linux you'll know that it is more flexible than other OS's like windows... you'll just have to learn how to "fix" certain flaws....

For instance?

such as compiling your kernel so that it is optimised for i686 arch, enabling hdparm so that your disks use DMA (which is prolly disabled), searching this board to find many optimization suggestions....

So, you're saying that the i686 or athlon kernel rpms are not compiled or optimized for i686 or athlon respectively?
It is certainly not disabled. Recent 2.4 kernels do the right thing and enable U-DMA automatically for your harddisks. If that doesn't work for you, it might be that your hardware is not fully detected or supported or that your harddisks are on a kernel blacklist. /etc/sysconfig/harddiskhd* to the rescue. No recompiling necessary.
Those would all be extremely minor tweaks. Nothing that would give a noticable performance boost or solve performance problems with Unicode.

oh yeah, by the way, RedHat is STILL slow, even slower, when i compile my own kernel spacifically for my arch. (PIII) so that doesnt help any...i already tried. i made it as small as possible, but it just runs slower. i learned that stock kernels are best.

Ok, tell you what I'll do, as soon as I have finished with my dissertation, I will put MDK 9.1 on my system, then I will post my experiences here.

Just for the record, I would love it if it was faster, I am not partial to RH per se at all, I have just found it to work best on my machine out of all the distros that I have tried (Slack, MDK 8.2, RH 7.3 & 8.0).

I have never used mandrake, but I have had installed on the same rather old machine at the same time RH 7.3, 8.0, SuSE 8.0, 8.2, and Slack 8.1. My machine is a 366 celery OC'd to 412 on a asus p2b - very basic hardware. I have also installed RH 7.3, SuSE 8.0, and Slack on an IBM TP with a basic pentium 233.

My experience has been the following:

On the desktop, RedHat 7.3 performed FAR better than 8.0. I prefer KDE to Gnome and KDE was so bad in 8.0 that I did a complete reinstall and left out KDE entirely. Gnome worked fairly well in RH 8.0 but was still slower than either Gnome or KDE in 7.3. I was beginning to feel like I might need to upgrade the computer until I installed SuSE 8.2 and found KDE to work very well on my machine. SuSE does as bad a job with Gnome as RedHat does with KDE - IMO. I could have lived with Gnome and RH 8.0 except for the fact that what ever RH did to achieve the antialiasing in 8.0 made my desktop unbearable to look at for extended periods - like there was a film over everything.

I just could not understand what RH did in 8.0 to make KDE suck so bad. Running SuSE 8.0 on the same machine with the same KDE version (3.0.5) was literally like night and day. The only benifit to RH 8 was the more up-to-date packages.

As for the laptop, Slack works the best of all three with SuSE a close second (were talking the older distros here). But to be perfectly honest, if I need to get work done on the laptop it has to be in windoze.

At any rate, I have finally chosen SuSE 8.2 as my desktop distro and slack on the laptop - both dual booted with win98. For the record, I did reconfigure the kernel and tweak the harddrive settings and none of this made much difference. I did at one point install RH 8 on a P4 1.5 gig machine at work and tho it did benefit from the better hardware I still got the feeling that that disto was fundamentally cripled in some way.

Just my experiences

YMMV

I've tried Different versions of Red Hat: 5.2, 7, 8, 9... I like Red Hat 7 and 9.... my favorite at the moment is Red Hat 9.... i might change my mind though... although Red Hat is my favorite distro i really hate Red Hat 8!....

That is so weird...I had 7.3 on my work system, and I was very happy with it, and then I tried RH8.0 and the speed increase was very nice. I use KDE and WindowMaker and it was much faster than the same combination in 7.3 (ok, maybe not much faster, but definitely faster).

Maybe it works differently on different hardware, although that is just a guess, not even a conjecture.

ahh... im glad that someone has the same experience with Red Hat...

cheers Vlad_M