i just installed slackware on my laptop last night, and so far so good. but i've noticed that my machine is running abnormally slow when attempting animations in X. for instance, i'm using windowmaker and whenever i have a dock which might run a small animation (my volume mixer has a 10x7 pix animation) my machine slows down and i watch my processor kick up to around 50% when it was at 0 before. another example is when i hide a window, the machine seems to take awhile to process the animations. everything runs find on my redhat machine (which is about half the speed as my laptop) so i don't understand why this would be affecting my system.

please help! :-)

Well, you didnt really specify what version of slack, or the specs on your machine, but i'll try to help the best I can to my limited knowledge First, check what all services your running. Slackware dosent have a "linuxconf", but its alot easier to disable services in the command line. Most start up scripts are in /etc/rc.d/
look through those files like rc.inet1,rc.inet2, rc.M etc and comment out the stuff you dont need with a #. Also, recompiling your kernel is a good move to speed things up.When you recompile, you can take out the things you dont need, and specify it to your system.And when your in xwindows, make sure your video is set up correctly.In /etc/X11/XF86Config, find your video card memory line, and uncomment it(sometimes its commented). Next, do a cat /proc/meminfo and see if slack is using all of your memory, sometimes if you have 128 megs, some linux distro's show up 64 etc, then you can just pass commands to lilo to pick up that memory.
Hope this helps

well, i think i figured out the problem (though i still haven't found a solution). i'm using running my machine in VESA virutal frame buffer mode, since i don't think my vid card is supported by linux. before i go any further, though, let me give my system specs:

slackware 8.0 on 2.4.17 kernel
IBM ThinkPad A20p
p!!! 750
128 mb memory
ati 128 rage mobility (16mb)

in my XF86Config file, i have the following lines for Graphics Device Section:

Section "Device"
Identifier "VESA Framebuffer"
Driver "fbdev"
#VideoRam 4096
#Insert Clocks lines here if appropriate
EndSection

so does anyone know if my vid card is supported? i can't seem to find any documentation anywhere on it, and as far as i knew thinkpads were fairly well supported by linux.

well, a bit of an update. i ran xf86config and it successfully detected my vid card and made the appropriate changes to /etc/X11/XF86Config, however now when i start X my video is COMPLETELY messed up. absolutely unusable.

so i'm wondering if anyone knows how to configure an IBM ThinkPad A20p to run X without using virtual framebuffering, since I'd like to actually use X without having my machine run like a 486 whenever there's even the slightest animation.

yet another update...

in my boredom here at work, i was searching google for solutions to my problem and found the following page:

http://www.zhlive.ch/zhl_contents_linux.html#Xwindows

hopefully, this will provide the solution... now i'm just going to have to wait until 5 so i can go home and try it out. i'm really going to have to find a way to bring my laptop in here. we use win98 at work, and... well... you get the drift. ;-)

considering yur specs on that laptop yu should have no problem... in theory... however yu do happen to be using a new kernel.... have yu recompiled it yurself?

a lot of times we often hear from newbies (im not assuming yu are due to the fact yu are installing slack on a laptop) that linux is slow... the kernel was precompiled from most distros to be able to load as many modules into mem as possible... i feel its always a good idea (especially when performance is slowed) to recompile yur own kernel to yur laptop's (or desktop) specs... in other words take out waht yu dont need and keep what yu do need... "kernel hacking" is not difficult and there are more resources for it on the web than yu can shake a stick at...

occasionally the problem is wrong drivers although grapgics chipsets are generally such that yu must have the correct one specified in xf86conf for it to show a decent picture... however there is an exception to every rule... i would try making sure i had entered the correct chipset beyond of a shadow of a doubt, ensure all peripherals are installed with the correct drivers and then go back and compile a new custom kernel as this has always helped me whenever i had problems like what youre having....

good luck and come back here often! i sure have and its made a world of a difference!

well, things seem to be a little better. after downloading xfree86 4.1.0 and installing it, i got an error when the configurator tried to detect my vid card. attempting to manually edit the XF86Config file myself yielded no promising results. so in almost desperate attempt to get things working, i just copied the sampe XF86Config file provided on the site listed above, and it worked!

now trying to get my wireless nic and apm working together (completely unrelated, you'd think...) is a another story. but after pulling out half my hair, i think i have things working the way they *should* be.

oh, and i wouldn't consider myself a linux newbie, just a slackware newbie. maybe i should have tried for a desktop first, huh? :-)