hang - normal?
 

hi everyone! good day! my name juan.

i am completely noob with linux. this is my first installation and i was glad that it went fine. the version i installed is red hat 9. i had fun exploring the new OS and the programs. it was really nice to try another OS than windows. forgive me for my noobiness but does red hat 9 really hang easily? when i open 3 or more programs, the openoffice spreadsheet, mozilla browser, and some more, it starts getting slow. i mean the reaction time of redhat is slowing down. like when you double click on a folder to open it, it would take like 6 secs. just to open. i know windows also has this problem, but it would take it more applications to slow it down. is linux really slow? could it handle multi tasking? because when it starts to get slow and i still try to open some programs, i would not be able to logout or even click on the taskbar or shut it down or even bring up a terminal window. and when that happens i am forced to reboot. and after i reboot, there is something like a "scandisk" program that checks sectors or something like that, i think. then it asks for the root password to continue the "disk rescue?" i think. i tried typing it and it gave me a command prompt. i could not recall what was written but i sure dont know what it was for. all i know is that it is some repair tool that i dont know how to use.

in short, im asking about:

1. why does redhat 9 hang quickly when i open many applications?
(above story)
2. is redhat 9 really slow?(above story)
3. is redhat 9 really multitasking?(above story)
4. what do i do incase my system hangs and i have to reboot
5. is there a program or how do i terminate applications like in window's
task manager?
6. when i play the games included in the package, they move so slow. is
there a problem with my 3d card? i think that game does not require
high-end 3d cards. (Tux racer and the spaceship game just above it)

thank you guys for your time! and i hope you could help me here. i would really love to hear from you. thanks!

here is my system specs:

pentium 4 1.7ghz
256mb RAM SD
NVDIA Geforce2 MX400 64mb
Redhat 9
built in soundcard 32bit
14" monitor
p/s2 mouse
aopen cd-writer
creative cd drive

When you type "hostname" will the name of your computer displayed or just localhost ?
If localhost or linux, give him a name.

Can be a weak RAM, did you run memcheck ? (You can download a CD-image at http://www.memtest86.com)

NVIDIA keep it's driver closed and you have to get it from their website, they forbid anything to do with the driver, even to share it! You have to install it "as is". (I will never buy anything from NVIDIA again)

(1)
I've not used Red Hat 9 (I use SuSe 9) but my machine is a bit less powerful than yours and I've never had any problem with the machine hanging. When installing did you allocate enough swap space? This is where programs that are not currently active get their memory written to disc, to save RAM space.

(2)Don't know, but it's quite recent, so I'm supprised at what you say. Running OO.o and moz at the same time should not cause problems, if you have enough swap space allocated.

(3)Yes it definately is, your machine just seems to be acting slow for some reason. Installing graphics drivers may help, or you may just have faulty memory, as
fluppi syas. The labs at my university use a recent version of Red Hat and it's very fast.

(4)
Doing a hard reset (just pulling the plug without logging out) can be really bad. Some distributions can handle it, but I remeber that RedHat always wanted me to run fsck afterwards. The problem is that when linux modifies a file's contents, the changes are not actually written to disc until enough changes have been made, in order to prevent unnecessary wear on the disc. This means that if the machine is turned off without having a chance to write the latest set of changes to disc the filesystem can be corrupted, and the files garbled (this almost never happens, but there is still the risk).

The command you need to learn is "fsck". You can read about it by typing "man fsck". I think that what you need to type at the rescue root prompt is "fsck -cr /", but make sure you check for yourself before trying it (I last used this command about 3 years ago).

(5)
If the processor seems swamped, there are 6 other consoles you can still access, even when you cannot start a terminal. Hold down Control and Alt, and press one of the function keys from F1 to F6. You will come to a login prompt. Once you are logged in, type "ps ax" (or "ps aux") to list the processes running on the machine and then use "kill -9 xxx" where xxx is the process ID (number in the left-hand column) to kill them. Then use Ctrl-Alt-F7 to get back to the graphical console.

(6)
The slow gameplay is definately because you don't have the NVidia drivers installed.The NVidia drivers work really well, but unfortunatly NVidia will not let anyone re-distribute them, and you will have to get them from NVidia's site. Installation is just a rpm, and maby a bit of file editing (I'm not sure about Red Hat, but in SuSe it's easy). It's a shame NVidia are so paranoid, but I can kind of understand their position -- if a competetor reverse engineeres their technology they could lose a lot of money. Their support is still, IMHO, the best from commercial suppliers.

oldyas and fluppi, thanks guys!
 

ill be doing what you guys said. forgive me but i have a few follow up questions for you guys:

fluppi,
how do i change the hostname and what is it for?

oldyas,
i have a 1gb swap partition and 9gb ext2 partition. would the 1gb swap partition suffice for my 256mb ram? i mean to help my ram.

which OS(linux) do you recommend i get besides redhat 9? ill definitely be trying Suse 9. but is it true that Suse 8.1 is better than Suse 9? im a student and can only afford to download, please help me choose my second OS. Slackware, Mandrake, Debian, Peanut.

where do you learn all this things? i am really amazed with you guys. what books should i read?

thanks guys! i really appreciate it! more power to you.

HOW DO I EXIT/ CLOSE XSERVER TO INSTALL NVIDIA DRIVER
 

hi guys! ive downloaded the nvidia driver but i dont know how to exit the XSERVER. i have read the "X man" but could not find a suitable command to shut it down. i found one under the SIGNALS which is "SIGTERM" but i dont know how to use it. THANKS IN ADVANCE GUYS! THANKS FOR YOUR TIME! MORE POWER!

open up a command line console.
become root 'su -'
enter roots password.
drop down to runlever 3 (same as runlever 5 but command line only) with the command 'init 3'
login as root... install the nivdia driver.
edit the /etc/X11/XF86Config file Remove the line that says "Load DRI" and change the line that says 'Driver "nv"' to 'Driver "nvidia"'
then get back into runlever 5 with the command "init 5"

you may also want to edit screen resolution and refresh rate in /etc/X11/XF86Config or just use a graphical program.. whatever.

thanks qwijibow! it did the trick!
 

thanks qwijibow! i can now see the nvidia logo before the logon screen. thanks to you! more power! thanks again for all those who helped me

use the chkconfig command to turn off unneeded services (Canna Server, isdn, etc)

thanks t3___!
 

thanks dude! it helped me alot! were do you guys get all this info? what books do you read? thanks again!

Change the hostname using the GUI: from the GNOME main menu, go to "System ->Settings"->"Network" and changing it there.
The name is, that don't need to remember it's IP-Number.

How to become a hacker in short:
1) Read every newer book you can get (but things can change very fast)
2) Get two PC just to play with: Make your own network on them, with www, email, ftp and ... Crash an old harddisk and try to fix it and so on. Learnig by doing !

...and patience !!! LOTS of it !!!
LOL... took me 32 trials to compile a fully customized kernel ! >.< but don't dismay.. not everybody is as dumb as me :P

thanks fluppi and qucho!
 

i definitely will do what you told me! thanks guys! more power!