Hi:

Yesterday I installed Mandrake 10.0 Community in my Compac Celeron (Mendocino). My computer has 64 MB of RAM and a i810 videocard. This time I am trying with the following partitioning scheme: /:729 MB, swap:1 GB, /usr: 10 GB, tmp/: 149 MB, /var: 3 GB, and a lot in /home.

I can use all the applications that I have tried so far, like OpenOffice, or get the system information. the problem is that the desktop (KDE) is really slow, it takes several minutes to open anything.

What can I do?

Try something like Fluxbox, which doesn't load so many resources.

A different window manager (flux) would help... but I bet for this is one time when you would benefit MUCH more from just buying more RAM. 64 is pretty low by most standards today. You could get that to 512 for a pretty reasonable price, and your computer will seem considerably faster.

I just gave away 384 meg to a friend, or I would have happily mailled you out my old ram (hmmm... actually I bet mailling ram isn't too good for it )

RUG,

You may also try tuning your hard drive with hdparm via these instructions ->
http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue79/punk.html

Hi:

My HD is a Seagate st380013a. I learned in Seagate's web page that this HD can be set to PIO 0-4, DMA 0-2 UDMA 0-5. I am using:
# hdparm -X64+(1 to 5) /dev/hda, but I can not set a value grater that UDMA2. Is there another command to change this?

RU

Not to sound like a jerk, but your question is answered in that article. If you ran the
command exactly the way you posted, that's not right. You don't issue it ambiguously,
but rather, specifically, like this ->
# hdparm -d1 -X69 /dev/hda (which is 64 + 5 for UDMA5)
Here's a quote from the man pageYou should read that article and follow it to the letter. There are other commands and
settings which are useful. Your drive can handle 32-bit I/O support, which is a great
factor in speed of transfers.
You can get verbose information about your drive by issuing the command, as root ->
# hdparm -I /dev/hda (upper case i stands for information)
And you can get complete information about hdparm by issuing the command, as user ->
$ man hdparm

NB: You must use a 80-pin ribbon cable on this drive since it's ATA100. If you use
a 40-pin cable, you will not get the maximum performance - actually, if I am not mistaken,
it will perform like an ATA33 drive without it.

After reading your thread again, I noticed something else you posted that isn't quite right:IMO your swap partition is way more than this comp can effectively use.
The standard recommendation is 2X your physical RAM. I don't think you
can make any good use of a 1GB swap partition, but that's just my opinion.
If you had the resources to run something like GkrellM you could monitor
your swap activity. There may be something else which will do this, also.
There is under KDE - search for a system utility.

And as the other gentleman mentioned, more RAM would certainly help.

I think mandy10 is designed more towards the latest processors. You did not mention the speed of your CPU. I used to have a celeron 433 mendocino and mandrake 8.2 was slow on that pc inspite of the 256mb ram it had.

Is a 498 Mhz proccesor, and now the computer has 128 MB RAM. Its a lot faster! thank you.

The HD cable is the 80 pin cable that comes originally with the HD. But still I can't set udma 5. This is what I am doin:

Check the HD with:

#hdparm -i /dev/hdb

I get a lot of information, I can type if you need it. But in line 9 i see:

UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 *udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5

Then I type: # hdparm -X69 /dev/hdb

I get:

/dev/hdb
setting xfernmode to 69 (Ultra DMA mode5)

But when I check again with hdparm -i /dev/hdb.

I still see:

UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 *udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5

Thanks

Some systems need you to type it exactly as I gave it to you in the previous
posts. Read them again, and the man page for hdparm, and that link that
I gave you. I promise, it's all in there. You're still leaving out -d1 and since
I don't know anything about Mandreck I can't tell whether you need it or not.

This time I am using: #hdparm –d1 –X69 /dev/hdb. I get:

/dev/hdb:
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
setting xfermode to 69 (UltraDMA mode5)
using_dma = 1 (on)

Then I check with -i, but UDMA modes is still *udma2

I was bold enough to add this lines at the end of rc.local

hdparm -c1 /dev/hdb
hdparm -d1 -X69 /dev/hdb

After rebooting and using hdparm /dev/hdb

I see:
IO-support = 1 (32-bit)
Using_dma = 1(on)
But –i tells me UDMA modes is still *udma2

I don’t want to waste your time, hdparm –tT tells me:

Timing buffer-cache reads: 312 MB in 2.02 seconds = 145.56 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 58 MB in 3.06 seconds = 18.97 MB/sec

Although I want to get the most out of this computer maybe these numbers are just fine. What do you think?

Another question, when then computer starts I hear a noise with a very high pitch, I want to try using hdparm –M but the man page says “this feature is experimental, use at your own risk’, what do you think?

According to what I've read, Mandrake recommends putting the HDPARM parameters you want to use in /etc/sysconfig/harddisks . If you edit this text file you will see all the paramters you need listed there. As was previously mentioned, you defiintely need to increase your RAM. Also, 10 Community does seem to boot a little slower. There could be multiple factors causing this - like the new version of KDE being larger, along with all of it's support files. Running tests with HDPARM in single user mode I was able to squeeze as much speed out of my harddrive as I could. Also, the flag -X67 seemed to be faster on my machine than -X68 or -X69, even though my drive supported up to UDMA5.

You might also want to look into UPX located at http://upx.sourceforge.net . This program take bin files and shrinks them down, then when the program is called the smaller program is loaded and expanded in memory, decreasing load times a lot. You can not UPX all your files, but you can quite a few. You should test each program you UPX to make sure it continues to function normally.

I hope this helps!

BW

don't run big desktops with hundreds of packages on an old pc. run a window manager or buy a new pc or upgrade it. kde will eat your ram as you don't have much, your harddrive ...

could you run xp on that pc with 64 MB of ram?

kde is getting bigger and bigger and for some people bigger with all installed is better and it is the main reason i still don't use kde.

RUG,

This is all good information. Back to what I put in my original post, run Fluxbox
rather than KDE. And if you don't have a lot invested in Mandreck, and would
consider changing to a faster distribution, such as Slackware. You can install
only what you want, rather than having so much bloat hanging around.

If you're interested in trying Slack, find out how your hardware was detected
and setup by Mandrake before proceeding.

What kind of speed are you getting? Please post the result of your hdparm -tT /dev/hda. How does this compare with the manufacturer's false promises?

Another thing: stay away from the X settings: you're playing with fire! There's not much to be dained there and a lot to be lost.

This is what I've put in my /etc/rc.d/rc.local :
/sbin/hdparm -d1 -m16 -c3

The drive now delivers 54MB/s instead of 18MB/s without these settings. Set only the -d, -m and -c switches and you'll be OK. And the performance improvement is really noticeable.

Uwe

PS Please click the Affero button if this helped.