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hey everyone, hope someone can help me here.... i just installed kubuntu on my laptop and find it to be very slow and bogged down. Now i don't like to mention windows in here but i was running winxp sp3 with pretty fast speed.(although i like the look of linux and am confident i'll find something faster). The specs of my cpu are: sony vaio pcggr370 pentiumIII 1.13ghz -m, supports enhanced speedstep, 30gb hard drive, 512mb ddr ram,agp-enabled ati mobility radeon -d graphics chip with 3d acceleration support, 16mb video ddr sdram, 133mhz fsb,and 512kb level two cache. I really enjoy the compiz features in kubuntu. If someone could tell me how to speed it up or if another distro would be better i'd be grateful. I also did all the updates with kubuntu, and it's just slow, and i refuse to go back to Windows. I also wouldn't be too upset if i had to do a fresh install. Thanks in advance to whoever can help me here!!!
PS. Is compiz compatible with all distros?
Distribution: OpenSUSE 13.2 64bit-Gnome on ASUS U52F
Posts: 1,444
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It will be difficult to have compiz and the full power of KDE in a Pentium 3. With these spects perhaps BodhiLinux will be a better distro. Bodhi linux is a good looking distro but doesnt have the 3D effects of Compiz.
Long story short is that all these eye candies take lots of CPU and RAM power and if you are using limited resources hardware is better to turn them off. Otherwise productivity will be short.
hey everyone, hope someone can help me here.... i just installed kubuntu on my laptop and find it to be very slow and bogged down. Now i don't like to mention windows in here but i was running winxp sp3 with pretty fast speed.(although i like the look of linux and am confident i'll find something faster). The specs of my cpu are: sony vaio pcggr370 pentiumIII 1.13ghz -m, supports enhanced speedstep, 30gb hard drive, 512mb ddr ram,agp-enabled ati mobility radeon -d graphics chip with 3d acceleration support, 16mb video ddr sdram, 133mhz fsb,and 512kb level two cache. I really enjoy the compiz features in kubuntu. If someone could tell me how to speed it up or if another distro would be better i'd be grateful. I also did all the updates with kubuntu, and it's just slow, and i refuse to go back to Windows. I also wouldn't be too upset if i had to do a fresh install. Thanks in advance to whoever can help me here!!!
PS. Is compiz compatible with all distros?
You might want to try an LXDE based distro. If you want stay with "big brown" then Lubuntu is an option.
Last edited by Ron Ritzman; 02-06-2012 at 07:06 PM.
Reason: adding URLs
Vector Linux will run good on that. It uses the Xfce desktop. Xfce has desktop compositing, and it's easy to disable if you want/need more performance. It's not as flashy as compiz, but it supports transparency. It will also be a lot easier on your memory than Lubuntu or Xubuntu, and probably run noticeably quicker.
Compiz is on the way out because of bugs. It's already been hard masked on Gentoo, and I think Fedora is dropping it as well. Gnome 3 and Kde 4 have their own compositing window managers.
PIII with 512mb ddr ram -- looks like a job for antiX ! Base install if you want to pick and choose your apps. "Lean and mean," as they say -- no DE, just a WM; Debian repos at your fingertips.
Suggest reading the FAQ link and then going online in terminal as root and typing in smxi. This award-winning script will make things easier for any user, including graphics drivers, utilities, swiftfox, cleanup, etc.
You could strip down Xubuntu to gain performance, install some lightweight Window Manager, uninstall programs that loads on boot and you don't use, through Synaptic package manager you can do all that. About your computer specifications and Xubuntu system requirements:https://help.ubuntu.com/community/In...emRequirements
Xubuntu can be as fast as you want but you will have to work around to get it done. If it is already installed then you just have to tweak it.
Compiz on a ati mobility radeon isnt going to be much fun. Compiz likes newer,faster video hardware than that. As an aside, I have never seen the point of compiz on KDE 4.X releases, kwin does pretty much the same job and its better intergrated into KDE than compiz will ever be.
Any current version of KDE 4.X is going top be too heavy for an older laptop with 512MB of RAM.
IMO if you dont want to change distros (which I would, but I dont liek the *buntus at all) you would do best to remove the KDE stuff and change DE (deskto enviroment) to Xfce or Lxde. Directions for how to do it here-
In both cases, just copy the "Remove Kubuntu" commands. Only do it once, and get either Lxde or Xfce..I'd get Xfce, but Lxde works as well.
WARNING!!! These commands only apply to Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric). To get the commands for 11.04, 10.10 or 10.04, go to psychocats and find the links for directions for how to do it with the other current versions. Its right at the top of the page, under the title.
Thanks everyone for your replies, I took Ion Silverbolt's advice and installed vector linux, and it is running really well. I'm very confused on how to extract and install tar.gz though
Let me tell you that I speak from experience, and Kubuntu is KDE and 512M of RAM just will never cut it running KDE, and yes as the others said, don't even try Compiz either however, MESA may be an alternative. You can search for it in the package manager or Synaptic. But that is a better alternative than Compiz.
I cannot believe none of the other responses that people posted did not mention this distro but I am going to recommend you try out and use if you like, Puppy Linux. And I suggest perhaps using this variant as there are a couple of diffent Puppies out there, but this one is the best by far: http://distro.ibiblio.org/quirky/rac...racy-5.2.2.iso and it uses a very new Kernel as well. Here is the main page I got the previos URL from: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=puppy
Do not let the name full you but Puppy Linux is the one of the strongest distros to have because it can do so many things to help assist you learning Linux that i cannot describe them all. But another thing is you do not have to make a user name but you are always "Root" so you can pop a live CD and not only run Puppy from there, but also mount your real partitions to make changes to or add files or find files that the actual distro won't allow. This can be very dangerous though too so don't make any mistakes. Everything has a Puppy theme in the name but pay attention to what it does. It has saved my a$$ many times too. Oh, and this particular one, Racy, has Ubuntu repos so you can add any software that Ubuntu offers to your Puppy list of software.
Plus, Ubuntu is getting worse. Just read around on Google searches for all that.
Thanks everyone for your replies, I took Ion Silverbolt's advice and installed vector linux, and it is running really well. I'm very confused on how to extract and install tar.gz though
Vector's a great distro: I'm glad you like it. What's the actual problem with installing? Normally you want to get programs from the Vector repository. That way they are recorded in a database so that Vector knows what you've got and can keep track of what relies on what. If you really must have a program that's not available, save as source code, click on the .tar.gz file in Thunar and the archive manager will run and unpack it for you. Then look inside the resulting folder for a README or INSTALL file to get instructions on what to do next. If you still have problems, come back to us. Incidentally, have you seen this: https://vector.ecosq.com/ic/HowTos
RELAX, I was once like you i had pIII on 700mhz Dell latitude laptop of 10GB, oh God it was slow so i installed on it DSL Damn Small Linux. It can even run on 50mb storage. Anyway you can install mint8 (helena) or a lower version its usually light weight.
Quote:
to unzip
#gzip -d appname.tar.gz
to extract
#tar -xvf appname.tar
or unzip && extract in one (combined)
#tar xvzf appname.tar.gz
512 MB is not a lot of of memory, Cascade9. Take for instance the fact just to run a Virtual Box requires a minimum of 512 mb itself, leaving your machine with 0!
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