HI ,

I hope some one can help me out here. I'm a new user to linux and I've installed redhat 8.0. The machine i've installed it on is a laptop PII 300 with 191 mb ram and 5gb hdd. According to the specifications requested by the redhat technical guides these are more then sufficient.

The problem that i have is this, the applications in Gnome graphical interface are terribly slow to open. If I click to open openoffice write it will take 20 - 30 seconds to open, the same goes for the mozilla browser and about 90% of the other applications. This make it terribly difficult to work on my machine, and i've even considered reverting back to win98 (hastely).

As far as the Gnome goes it looks great but it doesn't help me if its not functional. I've read a few other cases on the internet of the same symptoms or redhat 8 gnome, and i hear that kde is even worse. I've tried reducing the resolution of the screen, but with no luck.

Does anyone have any suggestions for me, they would be greatly appreciated.

The first thing I could think of is running ps aux to see if there are any unnecessary jobs running or even better running top which shows cpu usage.

first suggestion is to change you hostname in my machine gnome was slow and when i changed the host name it started fine second suggestion close all unneeded services like if you dont need web server close is in my machine i got 3 4 services running and third do not use gnome it uses so much resource use something like fluxbox or blackbox these are even faster than windowmaker check them out at
fluxbox.sourceforge.net

just use few services
you can edit your /etc/inittab
and rc.d for services
the easier way is
type setup
and go to services and remove the services that you do not require
i suggest that you do not use anacron/cron

Thanks for your speedy replies I will try all the suggestions and let you know.

Redhat 8.0 defaults DMA to 0 (off), whereas 7.3 will enable DMA to 1 (on). You can check the DMA settings for your harddrive with # hdparm /dev/hda. Check out this howto http://linux.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/272 on speeding up Linux and also see the man hdparm.

I just installed redhat 8.0 on a similar machine (if anything a less powerful one) and experienced the same problem. When I reinstalled redhat, i opened write and it asked me if i wanted to register the software. this time i chose the option "don't register ever" or something like that, afterwhich the software is loading up much quicker. My advice then is if you haven't registered the software, do so or let the computer know that you don't plan on doing so

i hope this helps

I got my hdparm set up but I need to " put it in onme of my rc.d scripts"

Which one and how?

put it in /etc/rc.local, simply by opening the rc.local file in your favourite editor vi, and by adding the neccessary hdparm lines in there.

Is it running better with hdparm enabled?

My experience is, that the standard kernel of RedHat 8 is the problem.
My System was also slow. But then I compiled my own kernel and now it works much better.