I recently installed Mandrake linux 9.1 on my really old system, it has an 100mhz pentium processor and 40 megs of ram.

I wasn't planning on using any graphical interface, so I din't install any.
The system performance is a lot slower than I expected, even using text based applications such as linuxconf takes minutes to load. I expected it to be slow, but nothing like this.

Is there any way to improve performance on this system?

One reason could be that a flock of processes is
eating up all RAM and the thing is swapping away...
To get details use:
free

Another reason could be that DMA is not enabled...
To get details use:
hdparm /dev/hd<x>
where x is the letter that corresponds to you actual hdd


Cheers,
Tink

you will have to completely weed out everything that is starting at boot that is not totally esential
then the first task is to rebuild the kernel to support only the hardware you have and absolutely nothing else
and also optimize for your pentium pro ( --march=pentium) by hacking the compiler flags in the kernel Makefile......

I used to use a 90hz pentium like that -- i did put more ram in it but was eventually able to run a gui like blackox or fvwm ok by building linux from scratch......

the think that never got better was the time it took to compile programs ......... long time .......
sometimes days.

those computers cost like 4,000 dollars when they were new

A pentium 120 was my main box until year 2000 somewhere, and I ran a fairly recent KDE on it at the time... a 100 should be very quick without a gui, so you must be running a bunch of background processes or something...

Take a look at Deli Linux:

http://delilinux.berlios.de/

it a distro based on Slack 5.x and does a neat job with older systems. I've a Compaq with a P1 - 166 MHZ with 32 of RAM running really neat. I even could get KDE 1.x to install and run smoothly. Some shots from my Compaq:

http://www.geocities.com/kooltux/sna...12_desktop.gif

http://www.geocities.com/kooltux/sna..._smiletris.gif

Good luck!

I found the same thing with a Suse 9.1 install to a Pentium 100 with 80MB RAM.
Debian Woody had been running much better on it.
I would suggest trying Debian or Slack.

If you're going for a CLI only install, I'd really suggest Slackware.
If you're not installing a GUI, I really can't see a reason to use a distribution geared towards desktop or gui-tool use, such as SuSE, RedHat (and variants), or Mandrake.

You'll find Slack much more pleasing.

VectorLinux is a version of Slackware with some more newbie tools, geared for slower machines. Check out that one, too.

Though all distros can be tailored to run very fast, some work better than others out of the box. Slack is one of them.

--Shade

If you've got an old box, you may need to make prefetch go away. It's great on fast new boxen, but on older slower boxen it loads a lot of stuffinto ram you don't always want there. See this thread for a discussion on prelink:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...55#post1145555

This may help.

My other reccomendation to get shit hot performance on an old box, yet stil have the latest packages, is to get your hands on gentoo. If you have a few weeks or a faster computer you can use to run distcc, you should seriously consider starting from the ground up, compileing and installing exactly what you want on it

I had a P90 with initially 32mb ram, eventually upgraded to 96 mb of ram running suse 6.3, and I used that and star office up untill 2001! I managed to get the overworked little box to produce all my GCSE and Alevel coursework. Once i've got distcc up and running i intend to rescue the old P90 for noslalgia's sake. It's acutally running Ipcop as a reasonably decent firewall at the moment, but it's not got enough ram to be a halfway decent proxy.....