perry wrote:
" i stopped the following services:

apmd, atd, crond, cups, irda, linuxconf, netfs, nfslock, ntpd, partmon, postfix, saslauthd, smb, wine,

i'm wondering about these:

internet, iptables, xinetd"

INTERNET is to start your internet connection as the system boots up. Maybe nice if you have broadband, but I'm on dialup so have it turned off at boot. I start it manually when I use KPPP to go online.

IPTABLES is what you use for a firewall. You either write rules for iptables, or use a GUI frontend like Guarddog or Firestarter to write them for you. It's a good idea to have iptables start at boot if you plan to use the system online.

XINETD is the daemon that initializes your X-windows server. If you plan to use a GUI like KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, etc, then you absolutely have to have xinetd running.

Is Slackware faster than Mandrake? I think marginally "yes" if comparing Slack 9.1 to Mandrake 9.1. But more importantly, my subjective opinion (and it is shared by many others) is that Slack just "feels" better than any other distro. It is rock solid. I'm a genious at breaking things, and have been unable to crash Slack even once, whereas I could get X to freeze up so bad in Mandrake that I was forced to do hard reboots- not even my keyboard would work ;-p Also, it IS optimized for i686!

If you are a total newb I recommend Mandrake if you need to get things done, and Slack if you have time to take a trip up a steep learning curve. Slack doesn't have an equivalent to Mandrake's Control Center to configure everything with a GUI. OTOH, you can just as easily choose to configure everything by hand in Mandrake, and just use the GUI tools if you can't succeed otherwise.

Mandrake 9.1 and Slackware 9.1 are the 2 best distros I've ever used. Sorry for the wordiness. I do tend to rattle on...

No no, xinetd is not the x-server daemon. Xinetd is a newer (I think) version of inetd, which takes care of all the connections to your box. It responds to any requests, and starts the appropriate service (daemon). Since I only allow ssh-ing to my box, I have disabled xinetd and only let sshd run. (It seems people disagree on whether to run sshd from xinetd or by itself, but this way I know what's happening.)

Sorry for that! Thank you for correcting me.

Siri Amrit

No problem, tigerflag

Hm, I apologize for getting a bit off-topic now. I'm planning to try out Slackware in a not too far distant future. Are there any equivalents in Slackware for Mandrake's urpmi and supermount?

I think swaret is what you're looking for...however in the future, you MIGHT want to just go ahead and post the question in a forum somewhere (slackware seems to be the obvious place)..the reason for this is that the people who might have the answer don't necessarily read ALL the threads.

Its just so you can keep from hijacking the thread (which is pretty much how its gone here IMHO since we aren't talking about whether 9.2 is worth the upgrade).

So for a definite answer, go ahead and open a new thread and ask...we won't bite...hard

Hrrm, yes, you are definitely right. Sorry about that...

OK, then I have a question ON-topic. Yes, actually I've had a hard time with my laptop and Mandrake 9.1, mainly the ACPI, the graphics and the sound. Now it works after recompiling the kernel and installing a new graphics driver and so on. Does 9.2 work better than 9.1 on laptops? Is it worth the upgrade? (More specifically, I have a Dell Latitude D600 - a real pain in the beginning.)

no need to apologize, i greatly appreciate you taking the time out to give me a heads up!

incidentally, have you have ever tried TurboLinux. it was the first one i tried about three years ago, that is, it was the first one that i actually got to install and work to some degree. had to give up on it when i seen how far the gui end of things had to go. ironically, i went and picked up a bunch of them SuSE, Caldera, Redhat and others but only TL made the grade and i knew nothing of Mandrake at that time.

Incidentally, I made the fantastic mistake (at that time) of trying to install a 5 gig Redhat distro onto a 1 gig free space area (my fault, my fault) only to see the installation program completely ignore the space requirements and proceed to distroy my partiition table.

live and learn.

thanks again

- perry

(Sorry, I didn't someone had already answered the questions)

If I remember correctly, iptables is the built in firewall that kernel 2.4 uses. You can configure it manually or with a gui like fwbuilder, firestarter, or guarddog. I used to use firestarter(gtk), but I'm not using any right now. I think if you turn it off at boot, and later want to use a fw with a utility such as firestarter, it will be started when you need it. From what I gather, using a site that scans for open ports, most ports are closed by default anyway. Therefore, I am not currently using a firewall with linux. If I'm running windows, thats the first thing I install(other than drivers). I'm still an amateur, so I can't guarantee how correct all this is.

Here's a link to the site I used to check vulnerability.

http://grc.com/x/ne.dll?rh1dkyd2

xinetd is a daemon that automates certain tasks and limits certain things if you need to do so. I dont, so i dont start it. I think the internet service starts internetworking devices at startup. I left this running, although I don't think I need it, and I'm gonna turn it off, to see if anything happens. I am on dial-up, so it shouldn't make a difference. Again, take all this with a grain of salt since I too am still relatively new to linux.

you might check around somewhere to see if any guru's can explain these things better, and if you come up with something let me know.. I'll do the same as soon as I get time.

I've never tried Turbo-Linux. Just Mandrake 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, Slackware 8.1, 9.0, 9.1, CollegeLinux v.?, Redhat 7.3, Debian, Knoppix 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, Elx, and a few others, maybe. Mostly it was distro-hopping because I didn't know how to fix anything and made the newbie mistake of switching distros looking for the "perfect" one. Actually, Mandrake 9.1 was pretty perfect. I'm sticking with Slackware now.

tigerflag, you mentioned that slack is optimized for i686. How or where can I find information to support this? I am confused because the iso's and packages say i386. Could you elaborate please?

Oh and to stay on topic. Im using 9.2rc2 and it seems ok so far. If you have 9.1 with contrib, tex, and plf, then 9.1 may not seem so impressive because 9.2rc2's kde isnt as up to date as tex's 3.1.4 for 9.1. In 9.2rc2, su session managment doesnt work as it does with 3.1.4 from tex. This is only a trivial difference but, there are probably others. And that's something I like when I open konq as super user, or mdk ctrl center, close them and reopen a minute or two later. I havent installed the updates or rpms from the final release so it may be fixed there. Im getting all the rpms today from school to try and upgrade 9.2rc2 to 9.2. Is it worth the upgrade? I really dont know..LOL Probably not.

is the performance better tho? Most of the positive reviews I've read about 9.2 is that while not much has changed, the performance enhancement is noticeable.

actually, i went from 9.2 rc2 back to 9.1 and i can't tell much of a difference from either that or 9.0 which i got on my other machine

<off-topic>

zarathustra674, check out the following thread(s) to answer your question:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=70677
<quote>

Maybe no need for i686 compilation
( post #4)

Hi all,

I just read in :

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3166&page=2

quoting:"

Almost the whole distribution is compiled with the CFLAGS set to:
"-O2 -march=i386 -mcpu=i686"
which means that it is i686 optimized and i386 compatible.

"

In that case, there is no need to compile it from source...

</quote>
------------------------------------------------------------------

All I know is it's fast...

Siri Amrit

</off-topic>

Tiger, thanks for the links. perhaps I should have researched a bit for the answer but I just assumed it wasn't optimized. I might have to check out slack as soon as Im back at the college. I dont know if I can handle configureing everything by hand, as Im used to all the drake tools. But its worth a shot. I suppose.

To get back on thread, I downloaded the rpms yesterday for 9.2, updates, about 2GB of contrib, and plf. So far so good with my 9.2rc2 to 9.2 conversion. I still dont think the kdesu feature is fixed which could explain why mdk left out file manager super user mode from the menu (apps, file tools). This sucks, but Im trying to figure out how to fix it. Ive created applinks to run konq as root, and kdesu konqueror neither of which worked (kept the password), when I tried to immediately reopen the app after closing.

Is it worth upgrading? I'll see after I reboot, but rpmdrake has locked up one me twice and I haven't been able to kill it at the console or with xkill. Not Good. Guess I'll reboot to see if the upgraded packages fixes it. I dont think I ever had problems like these in 9.1. Keep that in mind before you upgrade.

my dell inspiron laptop - pentium iii, 512 mb ram running at 500 mhz has mandrake 9.0 with 1/2 of the updates (downloading now). for some reason my 500 mb swap partition is only registering at 128 mb as far as the process viewers are concerned. that leaves me to think that the other 500-128 = 384 mb could be better served as a dedicated /tmp partition.

the question is, is setting up a dedicated /tmp partition worth it from a performance standpoint. i hate to say it but the windows 2000 is being a bit more respondsive to me (dual partition under system commander/partition magic) and i'm so curious as to why.

could it be that my /tmp as part of the root '/' is taking time away???

just curious, any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

- perry
ps.
i run nortons speeddisk religiously to get the performance that i do under win2k. whats the equavelent under linux