I upgraded from PCLinuxOS 2007 to 2010 on an old Compaq laptop two days ago.
The instalation went perfectly and took only about 30-45 minutes. After the bootup,
the desktop screen appeared perfectly and then the fun started. The harddrive is
simply working overtime and it runs literally for hours. I cannot come near the
laptop. Even the clock at bottom right isn't ticking and time gets stuck for about
30 minutes before moving on. At one point it all suddenly stopped however, the
moment I touched the touchpad, it started again and ran for another hour. I left it
to run overnight and this morning everything was quiet again. When I moved my finger
over the touchpad again, it started again and I eventually left for work after an
hour's running this morning. I cannot open any application or even think of doing
anything. Please help! Is there something running in the background or what.
I always thought that this unecessary taking up of resources is reserved for Windows
operating systems.

Please could you specify your hardware, which model is your laptop? Looks like it is under heavy load to me,
have you tried go on console and run top to see which processes are using too much ram/cpu ?
If you cant do that on X then go on one of the tty pressing ctrl+alt+(1-6).
Please post the output.

Regards

PClinuxOS 2007- KDE 3.5.3
PClinuxOS 2010- KDE 4.4/4.5 (depends on the version)

KDE 4.X uses a lot more RAM than KDE 3.X. Your 'hard drive working overtime' will be IMO because you dont have enough RAM to run KDE 4.X well. The hard drive 'working' will be because yor system is using swap due to a lack of RAM. KDE 4.X also likes fast, fairly new video cards. Your old laptop will have an older video card, if it isnt using an intel video chip. That will not be helping.

You could try installing and using Xfce, or Lxde, or one of the WMs (eg fluxbox) instead of KDE.

ukiuki's avide is good as well, and well worth following.

Hi, will install Xfce but need to understand, do I somehow have to uninstall KDE and if so, how do I do this?

Xfce, KDE 4, Gnome etc. etc. can all be installed at the same time.

I switched to Gnome in PCLinuxOS 2011 : The KDE 4 issue was "85 % CPU",
and some heavy hard drive use too.

But I suspect that some of it was "update data bases" ( like # updatedb ).
Some heavy cpu use in Gnome too, but it faded out (to 2-15%) after some time.

So, one more question, if I install Xfce in addition to KDE, how will the bootup know to deploy Xfce and not KDE or is there something that I'm missing or some change that I have to do?

An installed xfce4 should appear in the log in window, kdm or gdm.
Gnome did so.

If you have "automatic log in to KDE" : Log out, and select Xfce.
( You will be asked, if Xfce is to be set as default desktop.)

OK, without knowing exactly which version of PCLinuxOS 2010 you have (there is 2010.1, 2010.7, 2010.12) I cant direct you to an exact set of screenshots showing you how to do this. Hopefully the written version helps...

*edit- I forgot that you can have an automatic login to KDE. Good point knudfl.

You will need to change your 'session type' at trhe login screen from KDE 4 to Xfce. From what I can see of the 2010 login screens, the selection will be at the bottom of the login screen.

Thats all you have to do to get into Xfce. There might still be some KDE libraries loaded during the boot process, so RAM useage might be higher than if you cleaned out all the KDE stuff (not that fun for a lot of people) but it should be better than loading the KDE desktop by a long shot.

The 'use Xfce' idea will only help if your problem is lack of RAM. I'm 90%+ sure that it is a RAM shortage causing your problem, but you would do best to check top, htop, free-m or the KDE system monitor to see if you are using most/all of your RAM before you go trying to install Xfce. If its not a RAM/CPU use problem, installing Xfce could just make your problems worse....

After a huge struggle, I managed to dump the top results into an output file. I need to paste the results from another computer's browser for you. I'm having problems with mounting a USB stick with VFS telling me: Can't find a valid FAT fs on dev sdb and some invalid media value (0x00). It's a FAT32 fs and works fine on Windows and worked before on PCLinuxOS 2007. Some help with this will be appreciated, however, in the mean while, what is the core data that I should look at in top output to determine whether my problem is RAM related? I have also created a bigger swap file but it didn't help, I probably need to increase the actual partition.

Kees74, you are making things hard for yourself.

IMO we dont need to see your htop/top output, it would have been enough if you checked it yourself. But if you did want to post the output here there is an easy way- bring uop 'top', file-> 'save output as'.

You can save the output as a text file in /home, then go there and open the text file, then copy and post it here. Please use 'code' tags for allthese sorts of readouts, they make the forum neater, you can find the 'code' tags in the controls for the message when you hit 'post', its the '#' symbol. I removed the list of running programs, etc. from my top/htop output.

top-
IMO its easier to use htop to see if your RAM is being used-

htop-
If your memory was all being used you are running out of RAM. As for how to check that, there is a graphical (basic but still graphical) readout along the top edge of htop. With top, you need to check the numbers.

You can also get this sort of information from 'free -m' command.

Creating a bigger swap file wont help at all as long as you already have a decent sized swap file.

The reason why you have performance problems with running out of RAM and usign swap is because the swap file is so much slower than main RAM. If your computer needs to read or write from main RAM, it runs anywhere from 533MB/sec (_very_ old systems using 'PC-66' SDRAM, circa pentium 2-300) or 1.066GB/sec (PC-133, used by late P3s/early cheap P4s) up to nearly 20GB/sec (the newest, fastest DDR3). Even the fastest avaible HDDs are about 150MB/sec, and on older HDD in a laptop with the drive in part filled would be lucky to get 60MB/sec. 30MB/se would eb realistic.

So if your system needs an extra 180MB worth of RAM, it writes 180MB worth of what is sitting in RAM to the HDD. Even at the fastest realistic speed, that will take 3 seconds. Realistic speed is more like 6 seconds. If it needed to free 180MB worth of RAM to write/compared/process information that was already in swap, it will take another 3 seconds to write it, 6 seconds realisticly.

If the 2 files that are being inserted/removed from the swap are interdependant then you have a system that is always swapping, taking 6-12 seconds to do what would take less than a second if you had more RAM.

Well, in that case, it obviously is shortage of RAM. Any idea about the mounting of the flash drive. In fact, I copied everything that I didn't want to loose onto it about a week ago with PCLinuxOS 2007 and now it doesn't want to mount. I've got the Xfce package on there as well but no use if I can't mount it.

No idea ATM about what has happened with your flash drive.

I dont know why you've got the xfce package on the flash drive anyway. It should be possible to get the package from the flash drive installed into your OS, but thats the hard way.

The easy way would be go open synaptic, search for 'xfce', and then install it from there. I dont know what exact package you should install (I'm not that experienced with PClinuxOS, cant find a decent package search for it, and dont have a running install to check with).

1 members found this post helpful.

The reason why I'm doing everything the "hard" way is because I can only boot up safe mode. If you remember at the beginning of this thread, once desktop gui opens it's all fun and games and I therefore cannot simply open package manager. It's command promt for me...

I managed to put the Xfce tar file on a cd and successfully extracted it ti /home/kees74gtmp. Now, when Makefile, what target do I specify. I don't really understand where a person is to install packages to. My understanding is that one can do it anywhere but surely there is some logic and suitable place where stuff belong. Please help.

It might be really slow, but IMO its better to have to poke the machine once every 30 minutes for 2-3hrs to get xfce installed from synaptic than it is to be spending far more time trying to get things done the hard way.....

That doesnt help much.

To get better help, try actually posting what you have done and what you want (eg 'I have downloaded the source code from the xfce site, I want to install it to PClinuxOS 201.10''). If you tell us what you have done and what you want, its a lot easier to figure out than just saying what you want.

It should be easy to install xfce from the command line with PClinuxOS, I just dont know the exact command.

BTW, I did a bit of a search, the package you want from PClinuxOS is 'task-xfce'.