in general, what can i do to speed up my linux box? compile a slimmer kernel? if i could get wine to work well enough i would use linux for my main os. (desktop/gaming)

shuttle sk41g xpc w/ 266mhz fsb
amd athlon xp 1600+ 1.45ghz
512mb 266mhz ddr memory
80gb hdd

vidcard:
geforce fx 5200 128mb ddr memory

any suggestions would be appreciated

what do u mean by fast? boot-up or running time or program loading or something else? please be specific.

Also mandrake is quite bloated since it tries to include all kinds of software (its my opinion - No flaming please!!)

try stopping some unnecessary services.

For games, try wineX ( http://www.transgaming.com ). if u cant buy it, then u can get the free CVS version too

Here's all ya need:
Kernel
X
Ratpoison
Emacs

Everything else is just bloat.
That should get your system running pretty damn fast.

That's not particularly helpful, dude. That may be all you need at your level of expertise, but in all likelihood the original poster needs somewhat more than that.

You didn't say what window manager you're using. If you're using KDE or Gnome, you could try Fluxbox or Enlightenment. There's a lot less chrome but that means there's a lot less drain on your resources.

You certainly could compile a slimmer kernel, although in my experience it's very easy to compile one that simply doesn't work. Still, you shouldn't harm anything by trying so you can always give it a go. Leave stuff out a bit at a time and see what stuff you can compile out of the kernel and still have it work OK.

Throw out Mandrake and get a distro that isn't bloated.

Take a look at your hdparm settings. Do a "hdparm /dev/XXX" where XXX is your primary and/or secondary drives. For me I do a "hdparm /dev/hda"

Check to see if DMA is turned on and if you've got a modern HD and IDE chipset that IO_support is set to 3. Then dive into the hdparm man page to check out the tweaks that you can do. Every setup will be a little different but you can test each change with the -t and -T flags (use "hdparm -tT /dev/XXX"). I almost forgot to say that you should also do your testing in single user mode (runlevel 1) by dropping out of your GUI and doing a "telinit 1" as root at a console.

You should probably also check to see what services you have running. If you have installed packages such as MySQL or Postfix, they might be set to automatically start when you boot. In mandrake you can check these by running "/sbin/service -s | more" as root.

Then if you see that you are running stuff you don't need to be you can go into the configuration tools and turn the services off, or go to "/etc/rc.d" and rename the services from that match "S??<name>" to "K??<name>" where ?? is a two digit number and <name> is the service you want to disable at startup.

Personally, I wouldn't bother compiling a kernel unless you really feel the like expirementing. Running a slimmer DE like icewm does also speed things up, but I miss the conveniences of KDE.

P.S. The nonsense about changing distro is a waste of time. :-) It's only "bloated" if you tell it to install everything. Even then, all that happens is some wasted disk space.

I do recommend compiling yourself a custom kernel, I am pretty sure it made a difference for me.

As far as getting wine working to the point where you can replace windows completely, I wouldn't plan on it. I don't use windows much now except for games, but truth be told I can't get the same fps out of linux as windows...