I installed Mandrake/driva 2006 after having run 2005LE, 9.2,9.1, and before that, various Redhat versions.

This is the first Linux distro I have met that runs like Windows!

It is appalling. I had a process (mhonarc) that decided it should run for 4.5 minutes every 5 minutes, and cranked the disk like it needs serious excercise...OK kill that...thanks for the disk exercise!

Then, even without that, the machine runs like a 386 - Wesnoth, a 2D game, struggles and moves, stops, struggles, just to shift a map.

WTF?

Tried on my old desktop, tried on my laptop.

I think it is time to run away.

What goes with M2006? Is it better to run and hide (OK go back to 2005LE), or to try Ubuntu?

Jim

That's strange, because on my laptop (Dell 500m, 1.3 Ghz Pentium M, 512 Ram), 2006 runs quite a bit zippier than LE did. Maybe you've got some excess processes running. If you go the Mandriva Control Center, under the "System" tab, there's a menu somewhere where you can edit your startup processes. Mandriva probably just installed some excess packages, probably some server stuff or something.

First of all, if yuo don't need it , remove kat.

By the way, I have Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE) also installed on my laptop, and the difference is very little. Kubuntu runs slightly faster, but at the expense of a lot of functionality. Kubuntu is like installing a base system with absolutely nothing to go with. At least in my experience. I prefer a distro with some graphical tools (YAST, Control Center, etc. ), a few games, full office suite, audio and video players and tools and internet suite, and Kubuntu only had about half of that. Probably good for people who are looking for something more speedy and want to customize a bit, but I like that Mandriva gives me basically all I want without having to spend too much time setting stuff up.

Yeah, it did stuff, all right....

It runs mhonarc every 5 minutes after I use Evolution. mhonarc is a perl app that apparenly creates html archives of your emails - and I copied in my old emails.

But it also runs very slowly - like trying to run games on 386 ers PCs, in the days when you really needed more than a couple of MB.

ps -aux is a lovely command - but it only tells you what is going on, not why? I don think the Mandrake ControlCentre has any diagnostics that tell you whatś causing problems...and I am not running any services that look relly strange - except Clam, which came with the ¨Powerpack¨ (Brakepack?)

Thunderweasel - thanks, it is always helpful to understand the experience of others.

I posted my experience because I needed help with diagnosing a problem. I understand the normal boot time, and the normal reponse times

Perhaps you should see how long running ps takes on my system with Manidiot 2006. It takes about 2 minutes. Ubuntu, or Kubuntu, loads in about the time this takes to run.

Yes, I have copies of both. I´ll go back to M2005 for now - but I have doubts about Man-whatever.

Jim

Did you uninstall kat?

Yes, removed KAT, no effect - I may reinstall it just to see what it is like,sometime

mhonarc seems to be a symptom of the problem - some old Evolution folders were being beaten around by mhonarc, so I removed the old folders. After this, the problem was less ever, but still thrahing fairly badly.

kded seems to be the problem, but I don't know why. Googling revealed that this can sometimes cause excessive disk access.

However, I don't know what kded does, other than being a "KDE media manager". Given that I also can't get M2006 to recongnise USB devices (other than the cd drive I installed 2006 with), this may be relevant.

I also can't work out how to turn off or disable kded. Any ideas?

Jim

Sorry, should have been clearer on the USB issue - M2006 recongises and appears to mount external USB drives, but contents of the mounted directories is nothing! Can see /mnt/removable, but it has no files, zero sized, etc.

Jim

have you checked to see how many processes are running? There might be more than a few that you can halt. I have no issues with 2006 other than an onery nvidia driver setup (will not load as in 2005), but with a little work I'm sure that will be resolved also. Its a good distro, but I stop all services that I don't need as there is no need and would advise anyone to do the same. Kat belongs in the litter box as it is a real piece of crap and should not have been released yet. I'm sure they have heard plenty about that issue.

The main problem appears to be KDE related. After I opened either Evolution or Galeon, a process called mhonarc started, apparently trying to archive old Evolution directories to html? This caused the disk to thrash madly, reulting in not much happening (ps -aux took a couple of minutes to respond).

Killing mhonarc resulted in it being restarted unless kded was also killed. Even kded on it's own caused problems. Switching off kded in Mandrake then tended to result in being unable to mount usb storage (although it recognised the devices, created a directory in /mnt, but failed to mount).

Fiddling with KDE services has resulted in a working, relatively happy system, about the same speed as 2005LE.

Why this relatively unusual problem occurred is unknown. Possibly, restoring /home with a lot of evolution data, but this shouldn't be that uncommon. Certainly, Mandriva 2006 and KDE are necessary to get the problem, but this is a very common combination. Dunno.

thanks for advice and help offered,

Jim

I wondered about halting some of the apps in the process list that I don't need. As an example, can somebody post a bare-bones list of apps that should be launched on boot up?

Run MCC -> System -> Services and disable all the services that you don't want to run on your system. There is information about each service, so you know exactly what it does.

thanks for your help, will try that tonight...

Go for Suse 10.0 that I will get