dropline gnome
 

hi, iv been using slackware 10.0 for nearly a year and its always been super quick under kde and gnome. I just installed the latest version of dropline-gnome and its now running like a fat man in a corset. (only in gnome) any ideas about the dramatic performance change? - i know theres a few new bits, but shouldn't be this slow (10 seconds to load a gnome terminal - 15 seconds for firefox...)


im using a 2.0Ghz P4 laptop, 512mb ram - around 300mb swap, 10GB for my slackware / dir.

alain

You may be experiencing a dns issue. Check your /etc/hosts file and /etc/resolv.conf

/etc/hosts should look a bit like this:
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain systemname.domain.com localhost systemname

and /etc/resolv.conf should look like this:
nameserver 4.2.2.1
nameserver 4.2.2.2

Sounds very likely. This isn't particularly a "Dropline problem" but seems to be common on GNOME 2.10 in general. The general concensus is that GNOME 2.10 is faster than previous versions.

Additionally, check your firewall settings. If you're using any NAT, programs can hang and seem like the system is frozen.

I just want to add that your swap space should be 2x RAM. So if you have 512mb RAM your swap should be 1GB.

oops - i meant 256mb of ram - i got confused with my other PC. - so my swap space should be about 512mb? im hardly eating into swap at all, is this still a problem?

Shouldn't matter much. My machine never touches more than a few MB of swap. It normally doesn't use it at all unless I'm compiling something like Firefox. If you've got 300 MB of swap, then there is no need to worry (that's likely more than you need).

Are you using a custom kernel? Also, which sort of video hardware are you using? Is there anything showig up in "top" that's loading your machine down? Most importantly... Is DMA enabled?

hdparm -I /dev/hdX | grep dma

as root will tell you this.

This isn't normal behavior (the slow speed), but we can probably figure it out.

... root@palantir:/home/darkflow# hdparm -I /dev/hdX | grep dma
... /dev/hdX: No such file or directory

but iv just noticed, on boot, the last console messages before runlevel 4 kicks in are:

Kernel 2.6 is required for DBUS features.
Kernel 2.6 is required for HAL features.

im running slack 10.0, so i went with the standard 2.4.29 kern and iv not bothered to recompile it yet (although im going to soon coz im fed up with having to switch my computer off manually after halt [the force bios function])

i looked in my rc.local file, and a few lines have been added:
# To disable dbus, chmod rc.dbus to 644
if [ -x /etc/rc.d/rc.dbus ]; then
sh /etc/rc.d/rc.dbus start
fi

# To disable hal, chmod rc.hal to 644
if [ -x /etc/rc.d/rc.hal ]; then
sh /etc/rc.d/rc.hal start
fi


and theres obviously 2 new files in rc.d: rc.hal rc.dbus

i take it this is the problem?

do i need to get the 2.6 kern then, or is there a way round?

thanks for you help,
alain

"/dev/hdX" is the name of the device node for your hard drive. If it's "Drive C" then it should likely be "/dev/hda". The X was representative of your actual drive letter. I didn't want to assume that hda was your device, so I used hdX instead. You should probably use something like:

The HAL and DBUS scripts do not do anything on a 2.4 kernel. They are designed to simply print that message on startup:

If the script detects a 2.4 kernel, then it simply doesn't run HAL or DBUS. It's merely there to tell you that the HAL and DBUS will not function. They are not required for Dropline, but you won't gain the benedit of automounting of things like USB devices. This is not the problem. In fact, it's completely unrelated. :)

Replacing your kernel with something else will probably not change things.

By the way... Are you using an ATI card?

ha ha ha, sorry, i wans't concentrating with the hdX thing. yea, i know about drives...

iv only got one drive: hda:
- hda1 - grub
- hda2 - slack
- hda3 - swap
- hda4 - freebsd (currently testing it out)

the result of hdparm -I /dev/hda | grep dma is:
DMA: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5

hmm - looks interesting, i dont understand it tho :-P

if it is of any interest, OOo sometimes loads up in seconds, some times takes about 5 minutes - in which time the harddisk churns and whirls alot ...?

and yes, i DO have an ati card....
ati radeon - hardware accelleration is working ok (dri + glx with xorg.conf)

thanks alot for you help

The asterisk next to "udma5" indicates that it is indeed operating in a DMA mode (which is good).

If you are using ATI's drivers, you may want to try the opensource 2D drivers (temporarily) and see if things improve. I've heard reports from people that ATI's own drivers can really lag down some GNOME stuff, sometimes taking extremely long times to render windows.

thanks for all your help - ill try a different ati driver. i will stick with gnome tho, because it is excelent, even with the severly reduced speed. im gona have a look around freebsd and see if i have the same problems with the latest version of gnome - then i can determine whether the problem is gnome or dropline gnome.... its all learning tho !

peace :D