Hi - I have a year-old laptop running Windows XP, 512 MB of memory. Ever since I got it, I have been running RedHat 7.2 under Vmware 3 with 128 MB of memory allotted to Linux, and it has worked just fine. Over the weekend I installed RH9.0. I pretty much installed everything, so rpm -qa returns 1434 entries. Now Linux crawls, even if I allot 256 MB to it. So I'm pondering whether to (1) redo the installation of RedHat and be more selective about what I install; (2) go through the packages and laboriously uninstall things I don't need; or (3) upgrade to Vmware 4. I'd appreciate any suggestions about the best course to take. In particular, for choice (2) I'm wondering if there's a better way to do this than type 'rpm -e' a bunch of times :-) For choice (3), since Vmware 4 supports multiple virtual machines, I thought I might install one Linux version that's lean and fast, and one with a more complete set of packages for when I need them.

Thanks!
Luke

Why dont' you just dual boot??? In my opinion vmware is pretty lame. It has its uses im sure. I tried installing XP on a slackware host and was slow also. Also installed slackware on a XP host, was slow. If I were you would just scrap vmware and dual boot.

Red hat 9 may require quite a bit more resources than red hat 7 because of the different versions of gnome/kde and X that it runs.

I would suggest switching your window manager or getting rid of some of the extra options the window manager you have is running (like the background, etc). Make sure that vmware tools is installed.

Unfortunately I can't think of much more you could do to speed up the performance offhand.

If your redhat 7.x was fast and redhat 9 is running slow there is a 99.9% chance that it's the kernel. I've noticed some performance drops after 2.4.9 - even though this kernel had its problems it certainly ran fast. The slowest kernel (in my opinion) was the 2.4.18.

If you're having a performance problem just install the kernel from your last installation. You can install as many kernels as you like, just add an enty in your lilo.conf.

Cheers

I certainly hope the "speed" issue is dealt with. I realize that KDE and Gnome would take more resources. However, with a 1.8 Ghz. AMD Athlon XP, 256 megs of memory there should not be the extended loading times that are occurring.

I, too, would like to see Linux succeed.

I will try the less resource-intensive Window Managers.

Hope this "problem/issue" will be resolved so that KDE/Gnome can be as quick as MSWindows...

I hope the issue is some setting or combination that I am missing...