Hi,

Does anyone have speed tips for Linux, specifally Mandrake?

Ryan

Hello,

I've nothing to tell you specific to Mandrake...but rather a couple of generic tips.

The first thing to look at is hdparm. This is a tool for changing ide HDD settings. The man-page will probably not help much, so have a google for 'hdparm' as there is a couple of good tutorials out there floating in the ether, which should show you how to set/benchmark new settings to increase your disk throughput.

Second tip is roll your own kernel. If you are using default Mandrake kernel I can assure you that many things are compiled in or loaded as modules that drive hardware you don't have. You need to have a bit of experience getting your kernel config just right, and you may have to try a few times to get it, but once you get all extraneous cruft out of the kernel it should run (slightly) faster, but more important: more stable and taking less RAM.

A third suggestion is to make sure you are not running any unneeded services. IE: if ISP handles your mail, you don't need a mailserver running. If you don't have a website, you don't need apache running etc...

HTH

Actually instead of Hdparm try editing /etc/sysconfig/harddisks and uncomment the commented lines.

The settings there are a just bit more conservative than using hdparm straight out, but they guarantee that the data gets written correctly even with brain dead Western Digital drives.

Another thing that greatly affects boot speeds is to add the word "compact" (no quotes) towards the top of the /etc/lilo.conf line and re-run lilo.

This drops the kernel load times dramatically.

Your suggestion about adding the word "compact" to reduce kernel load times sounds great. Is there a grub equivalent? I use Grub on my system. Can the same word be added as a Grub command line entry some how? Can you tell me what the correct "syntax" is for it?

I have also often heard that prelinking can make KDE load WAY faster. Has anyone tried this? Do you know how? A "recipe" would be much appreciated.

Yes, prelinking will dramatically shorten load times of kde, but remember, that's just start time. It isn't going to run any faster....