Does Mandriva 2007 install a swap disk when doing the automatic install?
I am using Mandriva 2007 Power Pack, just installed it. Previously I was using Slackware 11.0 when I set that up I set up a 384M swap disk and then my regular partition.

When installing Mandriva 2007 it seemed to do everything automatically so I am not sure if it set up a swap partition or not. But I do know that Mandriva is running *alot* slower than I was running Slackware.
Just to open firefox takes at least 2 minutes for just the window to open.
And just every basic operation is much slower.

I am running it on an older laptop with a P3 Celeron 650Mhz
with 192M RAM.

Any way I can speed up the system? Or reinstall it with a swap disk? Would the swap disk make a difference?

I am still really new to Linux. So I am learning as I go.

Thanks!

If you chose the automatic partitionning, then Mdv installed a swap partition.

ok now that i am back at my system i was able to run fdisk
this is what i got

why would there be 4 partitions? When I was running slackware I had one swap and one linux type partitions.
I am still new to Linux, and trying to figure out what is causing the slow down.

hda1- all directories except users
hda6- users
hda2 =normally a swap but yours must have been chosen differently or the whole disk was not formatted
hda5=not normally used but I suppose hda2 was occupied so it set this up as swap 2.8Meg and I think you should have a minnimum of twice your RAM size? -google for that

Last I looked, Slack used XFCE, a lightweight DM - Mandriva is unlikely to be so kind.
On that hardware, it's a losing battle.
As for swap, what you have is plenty big enough - if it's being used. Try "swapon -s" to find out.

Personally I wouldn't do automatic partitioning because you can end up with unnecessarily large partitions in some areas and maybe some that are too small in others.

As for you disk, it seems like Mandriva created one primary partition which is /dev/hda1 and an extended partition /dev/hda2. In /dev/hda2, Mandriva then created a swap partition on /dev/hda5 and /home on /dev/hda6. This is quite normal for Mandriva, it does not make all paritions primary partitions. Creating a separate /home is usually a good idea because it separates system files and personal files.

You can use just about any desktop manager you want. If KDE or Gnome are to heavy icewm is installed by default. Or it used to be. Also fluxbox and xfce are available. From what I understand
Mandriva is unlikely to ever be as fast as slack or gentoo. What it does offer is a very simple to use system.

Ok, well this information helps a lot I may try icewm, and try the "swapon -s" to see if my swap file is on. Slack definately felt a lot lighter, but Mandriva is definately easier to use for me as a newbie

Thanks for the answers everyone!