Linux not so stable?
 

Alright, I recently installed Mandrake 9.1 on top of Red Hat 9.0, because I wasn't so happy with Red Hat.

Mandrake is great, but I must admit I'm disappointed with it's performance so far... when I run some applications, it just freezes up; for instance, I had gaim and xmms running on one screen, when I tried to run "clanbomber" the window just froze, and refused to do anything, even close. I rebooted, and for some strange reason xmms was still on my desktop when I rebooted! When I tried to play it, it gave me an error... when I closed it and reopened it, it played!

Another strange thing is, Mandrake seems to have automatically detected and mounted a FAT32 partition I have on my hard-drive.... I had to mount it in the fstab myself manually under Red Hat... how can this be?

If any of this sounds familiar to anyone or if anyone has any general performance enhancing tips, please let me know.... I really want to like this OS, but I must say even XP never did stuff like this :)

Thanks,

Boney

Re: Linux not so stable?
 

well i am not sure about the freezing...maybe you can sort through some log files, and see if you can track down any errors that may have occured....

as of mandrake mounting your fat32 drives, its a feature of mandrake... and first things first...
mandrake is not redhat...they are different distros, with pros and cons just like anything else...so if you thought that was cool, then it is a pro :D

Alright fair enough
 

Yes, I am impressed Mandrake automatically detected the partition.

Well, I have a Pentium 4 1.7ghz with 512ram, no monster but it sho0uld be more than enough to run any games included. Yet some of them are sooo slow, for instance Tux Racer is unplayable. Mind you, xmms plays MP3's fine....

When you say Did you format the redhat partitions or just really install right over it?

Re: Alright fair enough
 

if your games are unplayable, then that most likely means your going to need to install your video drivers....what card you got?

I just installed right over it.... bad?

I have an nvidia geforce2mx.

EDIT: You may be right, I didn't install a driver for it...

You might get away with keeping your /home partition, if you have a separate partition for that, but thee is no way you can have a stable system by installing directly on top of another distro. There are all kinds of libs and stuff left over from the redhat install that may be causing all kinds of headaches.

I have found that under the right conditions, I can lock a linux box up solid by trying to exceed the design of my video card. If you try to play tux racer on a P-II 350 with a 4mb ati 3d rage pro video adapter Bad Things Happen.

If there is a lot of virtual memory being used (swapping to the hard drive from ram), and the programs being run aren't designed for those conditions. Bad Things Happen.

If the processor and other components were getting a little warm under windows they will fry under linux. The linux O.S. will use all of the components to their utmost limits if you have enough processes running. This can be Another Bad Thing.

Mounting a vfat on install is just another script, whoop-de-doo.

Check your hardware: Cooling, Incompatible drives on the same IDE channel (WD hard drives with any other brand of hard drive on the same cable.), Poorly supported devices (check the HCL), incomplete or poorly implemented sound setup (Red hat is infamous for that), Poorly implemented DMA (refer back to sound).

Investigate the number of services you are running--especially file sharing like bittorrent.

Check your partition layout and swapfile/drive location and size.

Check IRQ assignments for frequently accessed devices.

Check DMA assignments for frequently accessed devices.

Check to see if the drivers are correctly matched to the hardware.

Check for incompatible software--it happens. Also check to make sure that all of the dependencies are met for the software--also been know to happen.

Just the same as you do with windows--if you could tweak windows 2000 professional/server you can tweak linux. Same process, you just go about it in an unfamiliar way.

Well, there was one thing I was hoping wouldn't be a big deal, but I made a swap space 1024m big because I read somewhere that you should have a swap space twice the size of your RAM... later, I found out that 500m should be the max... so that might be the problem with the games. Also, I never installed a driver for the video card.

I think my system should handle "tux racer", it can play Age of Mythology etc.

I presumed mandrake would format the drives while installing, now I know better, I will format that portion of the drive with Partition Magic now and reinstall. I will also cut a new swap space only 500 mb big (and pray to god that my Windows partition is still accessible afterwards [damn Partition Magic]).

Thanks for all the help guys, you see any flaw with my plan?

Re: Alright fair enough
 

Thats faster then mine and Tux Racer works fine, XMMS won't play Mp3s, but thats not my computer thats because it won't support it anylonger. I guess you got all that fixed now tho, so this part of my post is just nothing..

I wil pray with you, I had to reinstall windows once when I messed up the Partitioning.. Of course I am sure you have done this plenty more times then I had done it.. G'Luck.

"I think my system should handle "tux racer", it can play Age of Mythology etc."

I have a nVidia Geforce4 440 MX (32MB ram) and i couldent play Tux racer w/o the driver. there is no 3d accel support with out the driver , i installed the driver and tux racer runs smooth.

so....read this

You could have some sound issues,too.Try to play something with xmms and open another app that uses sound.
That makes my box crash and burn.

Thanks for the link Dr.Ozz, I actually was looking at that.

I decided to do it Master C's way, but I have a question, what do I do after I reach the point where I type "telinit 5"? How do I get back to X?

Also, how important is it that I update Xconfig?

Thanks

J

telinit 5 is what gets you back to X.