Too slow any way to make it faster?
 

I installed Debian (the testing one for i386) yesterday (dual boot with win98), just a plain console like install without x on accident, so I installed xserver or xfree86 or something like that, then kde. KDE ran very slowly, so I installed fluxbox but it still seems slow, would deleting kde speed it up?
Computer I installed it on had a pentium 3 500mhz, 64mb of ram with a 13 GB HD partitioned with a 4 GB partition for win98 and 9 for Debian.
Basically i want it to go faster. this is my second day of using linux and I like it so far, but its too slow.

KDE is very big. I felt it was too slow too when I had a 500Mhz machine (of course it also depends on your RAM). Gnome is a bit faster, but if you want really fast on your machine try FluxBox.

My initial guess would simply be that you need more RAM.

i would install it on this computer I'm using now but my parents probably wouldn't let me install linux, this computer is only 3 or so months old,

hi,

Absolutely, yes!!!!!! Both KDE and Gnome are resource-hungry. I've had Debian running on an old iMac with just 64MB RAM, and boy was it slow. Debian itself is a fairly quick distro....

By contrast, Mandrake 10.1 on an old Celeron 330MHz machine, with 512MB RAM was actually pretty good - KDE ran fairly smoothly. It wasn't lightning quick, but more than acceptable for general purpose use..

Ubuntu (Debian based) on an Athlon XP 3000 / 512MB RAM absolutely flies - it's pretty darn good on a 1.1GHz / 256MB RAM machine, too!

Get hold of some more memory.

ead up on dual booting and give it a try anyway. THat way you'll also be able to see for yourself the performance difference between Windows and Linux and, who knows, convince your parents of which is better:cool:

i can't really afford computer stuff, I don't have a job i thought about mcdonalds but i'm too young, i've ran livecds on my parents faster computer, and its faster then my current setup,

Where do you live? May be a Computer shop that you could clean up and trade for some old ram,some one may be throwing away a old computer that doesn't work anymore etc,etc.

More RAM would help, but this is linux, he should be able to get a modern OS on an old PC. KDE is a bit of memory hog, and that's probably what's causeing your trouble. There are some districutions specifically for older hardware. Never tried any, google'd know.

Yes get rid of KDE. You said you tried fluxbox. A couple other lightweight window managers are XFCE and IceWM. I love them both.

If you can't get it any faster, you might try a a different distro. I here Slackware is a good one for old hardware. You might also try Vector Linux, it's what I use. The current versio, 4.3, is based on Slackware 9.1 but has an updated kernel (2.6.7). It is a lot simpler to install then Slackware Classic and it's stable. I've been running my lappy for 2 weeks non-stop (plugged into the wall).

If nothing else works look into more RAM

Also, check for active services. Some of the monitoring services are unnecessary, especially if you are not on a network or not using a printer. They are RAM-hoggers.
KDE is a bit heavy, so is Gnome. Fluxbox, Openbox, XFCE and Enlightenment are much lighter.

I typed in free in the command line to see how much extra memory i have and it says i have 0 total swap, would that effect anything?

I googled swap and created a swapfile used it and now it seems faster and its better at multitasking now too. Thanks for your help though :) yes I'm running fluxbox.