Streamlining my notebook
 

I put SuSE 9.1 on my backup notebook yesterday. Here's what the specs are:

GATEWAY SOLO 5100XL NOTEBOOK COMPUTER
- Chips & Technologies graphics adapter - 2 MB
- 5 GB Hard Disk Drive
- 3.5" FD (does not write for some reason...)
- XGA display
- Touchpad
- 80 MB of RAM
- Pentium II Mobile processor at 233 MHz

I need to be able to use OpenOffice.org and a thumbdrive (that's why I chose SuSE 9.1). Some festive wallpaper would be nice too, as would KDE. I do not need sound, though the sound card has not worked for about three months anyway.

I also need to be able to sync my Tungsten T|5 via USB.

To be brief, I need to know if there is anything I can do to streamline the system so that it runs faster. I know in Windows there are drivers that one can disable, and on the Mac you can turn off extensions. What is the linux equivalent? What is recommended in terms of memory and processor hogs that I can disable?

I need to use this thing at school, so suspend/resume is also a must.

Thanks,
pck

the suspend/resume function can be enabled with the acpi module, works really well in suse 10, not sure about the earlier versions,
kde and nice wallpapers are good for eyecandy etc but it eats performance like no-ones business,might drag a bit on your machine.
definatly recompile the kernel to take out drivers you don't want to start up, edit the files in /etc/init.d, so they wont start unless you tell them to (just the non-essential progs mind you)

hope that helps a bit

If there's any possible way to add more RAM, do it. That's probably the most significant thing you can do to speed things up. I've got an ancient Compaq laptop that I use (very) occasionally with 96MB, and it's still pretty slow when I want to use something like FireFox. Usable, but slow. Haven't tried OpenOffice on it, so I can't speak to that, but I'd imagine that without additional RAM, you're only going to see minimal performance increases via kernel recompile.

your lappy has 2 mem. slots for max 144MB ram. Memory would be most effective purchase. Have swap of 250MB. Get latest BIOS. Review SuSe 9.x install manual for minimal install and add pkgs you want or work backwards and remove pkgs from normal install. Do you need/want full openoffice2?
Review SuSe 9.x hcl. Try latest SuSe kernel that supports hw you want. If you can, use xfce instead of gnome or kde to save on resources. Check linux-on-laptops and SuSe forums. Good luck.

Although eye candy is nice, for this machine if it's not necessary than you might consider a smaller WM like XFCE or ICEWM. KDE is the most full-features WM so it needs the most memory. I wouldn't even try to run KDE with less than 128MB RAM. With you're hardware I think a setup like XFCE running OOo with nothing else open would be just a bit slow but plenty usable.

Another thing to look at for increasing performance would be services that load at startup. If there's anything you don't need turn them off to free up more memory.

I'm still new to this. Where do I go to do that?


Suffice it to say I'm beginning to appreciate TWM...