Hi,
Brand new to linux and just installed RedHat9.0 on my PII.
It only has 32mb of RAM.
This machine use to run win 98 and did that fine. It is very .. very slow with RedHat 9.0. The HDD is always racing when i ask it to do anything and it takes forever.

1st question. Is this machine just not powerful enuff to run RedHat 9?
2nd Q. Would changing the SWAP from it ~200mb to 64mb help?
3rd Q. How can u change the swap file size?

Thanks in advance.

welcome to the community!!!

=)




how much swap do you have right now???

how much of it is being used when you've got all your stuff running???


post the output of this command:

free -m


you can also post the output of this to show us more or less what kinda setup's on your disk:

df -hT



yes, adding swap can be very helpful to low memory systems...

but if, for example, you already have 1gb of swap and are on average only using 300mb, then it won't really make a difference...


here's red hat's info on adding swap:

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...ap-adding.html



a likely reason for red hat 9 running so slow on your machine is that bluecurve is not exactly the lightest thing out there if you know what i mean (i'm _assuming_ you're using bluecurve, the default red hat desktop environment)...

with 32mb of ram you'd probably want something like icewm, xfce, or blackbox...

those are window managers made to be very fast and not require so much power...


blackbox is my personal favorite, you can get the rpm for it here:

http://shrike.freshrpms.net/rpm.html?id=1222


to install it just do a (as root):

rpm -ivh blackbox-0.65.0-fr4.i386.rpm


then you'd just have to put something like this in your ".xinitrc" file, to make x start blackbox instead of bluecurve:

exec /usr/X11R6/bin/blackbox


the location of blackbox on your sytem will probably be different than mine, though...


http://blackboxwm.sourceforge.net/

http://www.icewm.org/

http://www.xfce.org/

thanks for the reply.

free - m
total used free shared buffers cached
mem 28 28 0 0 0 9
-/+ buffers/cache 17 11
swap 188 45 142


df -hT
file system type size used avail use% mounted on
/dev/hdb2 ext3 4.6g 1.9g 2.5g 44% /
/dev/hdb1 ext3 99m 9.0m 85m 10% /boot
none tmpfs 15m 0 15m 0% /dev/shm



Just a few more questions.
1.How can i pipe the output of a command to a file on the floppy drive?
2.When i chkconfig --list there are alot of services running. Which ones do i not need?


Thanks again.