I'm a Slackware 8.1 newbie, but I like to think I'm making decent progress.

My question:

In KDE, my desktop windows seem to be a bit sluggish; they drag across the screen with a lag, leaving quickly disappearing duplicates of themselves. Also my screen savers seem not to be using the hardware acceleration in my Voodoo3 card.

Are these both symptoms of the same problem? Do I need to spice up my OS with some 3dfx drivers (other than the ones included with the distro)? I'm almost sure that's what I need to do as far as the screen-saver issue goes. But the desktop issue seems memory related. Mozilla has that sluggish feel also.

AMD Duron 950Mhz
256 MB RAM
20 gig hard drive with 8 gig partition for Slack
52X atapi CD-Rom
Voodoo 3/3000 Video card
on-board AC97 VIA sound
Linksys network card

Thanks in advance for any tips!

--Akshun J

All I can say is..... USE FLUXBOX!!

it is a really nice window manager that uses a very small amount of memory (especially compared to kde).

or blackbox ..

Hmmm... Fluxbox or blackbox. Never heard of them. I'll give it a search, though. Thanks for the suggestions.

Anyone have any suggestions on my driver issues?

or enlightenment......

Or you can try IceWM

Or TWM

FYI, TWM is closely the most basic usuble window manager there is. Anything less would simply be xinit

Cool

Oooh, now you're talking! I've actually got TWM running on my smaller machine... it's not quite as nice as Sawfish (IMO), but it still rocks! And having a solitary xterm running under xinit - what could be better!

OK, seriously now. I believe that there are some extra little things that you can do to make use of the accelerated portion of your 3DFX card. I'm pretty sure that they are not enabled by default in any distro, let alone Slackware. TLDP (in my sig) is a good place to start... IIRC there's a good Howto on the 3DFX cards, but I think it's getting quite old, best check XFree's site aswell for additional info.

As for your KDE being sluggish... that's just KDE. Gnome (IMO) is not much better. If you want lightweight desktops, then go for any of the above.

I used E before black/fluxbox, E 16 is buggy, very nice, but buggy, I cant wait to try E 17, it looks sweet, but after flux/blackbox its hard to go to anything else, you just get addicted to them, like to slackware
IceWM is nice too, if you're into windows-style desktop.
-NSKL

Fluxbox! *chanting*

2 seconds to finish loading, enough said! Next Q you ask would probably be where TH are the apps. Or file manager.

add the apps you want..... IS there a better filemanager than midnight commander?

Was that a real question or a statement? If it's a question, then surely the answer depends on what you want from it? If you want GUI filemanagers, then there are plenty of options... many of which will already be a standard part of your system (KDE or Gnome filemanagers, for example).