Okay. When i first chose to give linux a try, one of the reasons was how it could be totally customized for your system and made super fast. But to tell you the truth, i find it kinda slow compared to windows (although i don't mind because it's rock solid stable). So i was just wondering what sort of tweeks i could do to my sytem. Running a different window manager, file manager, recompiling my kernel (if it will help please point me to some tutorials).

My system is:
Athlon XP 18
Red Hat 8
256 DDR
40 Gig
S3 Prosavage integrated video (don't make fun)
Sound Blaster 128

Any help would be great.

THanks
Abe.

most likely the computer itself is faster under linux, but your GUI is slowing you down. what desktop are you running? if KDE or Gnome, you will gain speed by switching to a lighter weight window manager, as you mentioned.

also, do a search on LQ for turning off unnecessary daemons and services. sorry i don't have a link handy, but there are plenty of threads here on the topic. gl

>edit, forgot to mention to check out hdparm too, to make sure your hard drives are working in DMA mode:

hdparm -Tt /dev/hdx

where hdx is the hard drive you want to test. compare your results to see if your hd is up to speed in the hdparm thread.

If your Redhat is anything like my Mandrake 9.1, synaptical is dead on. Check to see what services you can turn off and change desktops. Ice is pretty light therefore pretty fast. KDE and Gnome are the slowest in that order. I use KDE but my rig is fast anyway so I don't care. But Ice is like lighting on this rig but I don't like it much.
There are distro's out there that you can compile specifically for your system without a lot of bagage. You may want to get familiar with Linux before doing that though. I may try it this winter sometime.

Making Linux Super Fast...

I'd have to say by doing nearly everything you can from the command line, you'll see quite a bit of speed increase

My fastest system I've ever used was the one I built with LFS. Boot time was less than 10 seconds, and applications opened as if they were just waiting in the background (but they weren't). Running anything on that thing was lightning fast. Why? It might have had something to do with all my applications being optimized for my specific architecture. It might have had something to do with my choice of applications to run, and the gui to run them in. However I believe it was a combination of all that plus the fact that I installed ONLY those things I was using, and only the thing necessary to get them to run. I believe that alone would be the biggest improvement on any system. Remove all that you don't need, you'll be left with a screamin system.

KDE can even screen when compiled right, given the comparison to a binary release

Cool

hi

run redhat-config-services from setup/settings menu or ntsysv from the command line and check out services you dont use.

try switching to a light weight window manager if thats a choice.

in /etc/sysconfig/harddisk

take out all the comments marked # before the commands and reboot

remove fonts that you dont use

hope that helps