hey all,

(first posting!)

ive installed red hat 8 on a box with
- Pentium 400MHz
- 96MB RAM

It runs fine in run level 3, but when it boots KDE or GNOME it runs extremely slow. tops shows that either the init process or XWindows uses all of the cpu, or both together. So all the time the cpu is at 99-100% usage.

Also, on the display (in Xwindows) there's fuzzy lines running down the screen, and it seems as though some sections of the screen are repeated... sounds weird eh?

So is it just the fact that the machine im using can not take the power of redhat? or is there some configuration which I can change?? I really have no idea of what to do - so any advice will be helpful

Welcome to LQ.

Try running:
redhat-config-xfree86

As root and make sure your hardware is configured proprely. You may also want to check that your video card is supported:
http://hardware.redhat.com/hcl/

thanks david,

who would of thought that not configuring the monitor type would have such profound effects on system performance.

I changed monitor type from generic to 'hp pavilion m70'.

Now there's no fuzzy lines on the screen, and CPU usage is now around 15% all the time. I don't know if that is the best number, but its way better than 100% So i can now comfortably cruise around XWindows without too much waiting. Cheers!

15% is better than 100% but imo, that cpu usage is still high especially if you're not doing anything extensive or complex. i'm using konq to browse the web and listening to tunes on xmms and my cpu load hovers between 0 % - 4 % with 71 processes running. i'd go into your service configurator and see if there's any processes that start up that you don't need and disable them from starting up. then go ahead and kill the running processes.

in kde:

Kick Start > System > Service Configuration

I had the same and I changed video memory in bios to be the same as video memory used by KDE and that allowe me to chang resolution to higher one.