How do you guys mean "window maker is faster than any other." I know its faster than gnome and kde, but how is it faster than IceWM or AfterStep, or Blackbox !? What maks WMaker so special making it faster ?

Also, i was reading a post about hdparm, and someone says "run this at boot time and it will speed up you hard disk"

He said type in something like hdparm -c 1 -d 1 /dev/hda

i typed that in and it was successful. now my question is, how do i get linux to automatically initialize this at boot time ? how do i get the booting kernel to automatically type this in and execute it ?

Add your line
hdparm -c 1 -d 1 /dev/hda
at the bottom line of the file /etc/rc.local and it will be ran everytime you boot into mandrake.

Sheers,
/Jens

...whops got answered while i was typing the reply.

also, i dont want gnome to be my default desktop environment. when linux autoboots X, it also autoboots gnome, and i want it to autoboot ICEWM instead if GNOME. What do i edit to change it from gnome to iceWM ?

I suggest you look into the file ".xinitrc" in your home directory.

there is no ".xinitrc" file in /home/myuser or in /root, or anywhere in my home dir. i am using mandrake 9.0.

i remember when i first logged in after installing, it had a stupid mdk user configuration thing for choosing my fedauly window manager/desktop and my mail server and my registration. this wasnt while installing, but after the first bootup after running X.

When you boot up; are you prompted to input a username/password? If so, there should be a select-box somewhere there in which you should be able to change what desktop environment you'd like to use when you log in.