Win XP/ Red Hat 7.3 dual boot = slow
 

I have just set up a dual boot system on my computer, Things aren't going too well though i'm afraid to say . I have set up a dual boot with Windows XP and RedHat 7.3. My system spec is ASUS A7V-266-E Motherboard, 256meg PC2100 RAM, Ge-Force 2 Ti 200 64Meg, Athlon XP 1600+, one seagate 30gig 5400Rpm hard drive and one 80gig 7200rpm hard drive. My indows XP is installed on the 80 gig which is partitioned into 2 32gig and one 12 gig partition. Red hat 7.3 is installed on the 30 gig. When the grub boot loader loads up there is 3 versions of red hat available (They are something like, red hat linux-up (2.4.18-3), red hat Linux-spm (2.4.18-3) and red hat Linux (2.4.18-3 BIGMEM)) and Windows XP. When i try to load one of these Linux versions and log in with either my guest or root account i get a segmentation error and the guest account doesnt load the grey bar at the bottom (I'm new to Linux) I though maybe the guest acount isnt meant to have one but its when i try to load things i feell like crying, It is so slow! I think if my computer can run UT2K3 on nearly full graphics quality with no slowdown it should be able to cope with chromium but it just cant it runs awfully slow for about a minute then crashes. Please can you give me some advice on how to speed things up and let me know whether there should be them 3 versions of linux in the boot manager. The boot also fails on loading the Eth0 (?) but carries on (is there any button i can press to automatically fail this straight away rather then having to wait 10 minutes to fail it anyway?). If you know anything that could help me get linux to run faster please let me know as im dieng to start getting into it.
Thanks.

It sounds to me like your having the standard nVidia problem! The graphics portion of Linux, called X (or XFree86, and many other names, but we'll call it X) uses a default driver for the nvidia cards called nv. Now, let's imagine for a moment, your XP setup running on 'default vga' setting (or whatever) and not knowing about your GF2 card - do you think that UT2003 is going to run nicely? Nah, I didn't think so! You need to head over to nVidia's site and download the Linux drivers. I would suggest that you get the files ending in .tar.gz coz in the long run you'll have much less hassle with them! I would also suggest that you sit down and read the README file that comes with them (well, it's on the same download page :D) very carefully before you even attempt to install the drivers - there's no InstallShield for Linux, so you will need to be sure of what you're doing.

The three version of Linux you speak of are:
Red Hat Linux UP - stands for Uni Processor, a single CPU.
Red Hat Linux SMP - stands for Symmetric Multi Processor... 2+ processors
and RHL BIGMEM - Something to do with the amount of memory your computer has! Not quite sure why you'd have this...

The boot failing on eth0 could be due to many things... if you have a LAN and you already have a DHCP (auto-configure IP address thingy) setup elsewhere, and you have this machine setup to be a DHCP server too then things will clash. Firstly, do you need networking?

HTH