so i boot into red hat 9 with my custom built (myself) pc ( amd xp 1800 , 256MB ddr, soyo dragon MB, geforce2mx440 32MB graphics ) and redhat 9 by defualt is using 136 MB of my precious limited memory. sorry more mem is not an option for me right now. i can boot into xp and it's only using 89MB of mem.
how can i put redhat on a memory diet without sacrificing stability? linux is supposed to be totally configurable right? can i run rh9 w/out a gui? can i do somethin different and keep my nice blue curve desktop?
i tried to run quake 3 arena demo in rh9 and it barely got through the menus , on the lowest settings, then crashed on attempt to actually play.....it was like i was trying to run it on a pentium 1. i played quake on a pent2 333 with 128 ram in windows and it ran smooth as silk. now i have a decent machine and i cant play while in linux. i really want to like linux, bill is too rich already, but with issues like this , what ' s a geek to do?

System Settings-->Services

Turn off all not required. Some are obvious, some not so obvious.

RO

Use the following to show which processes are using the most memory on your system:

ps aux | head -1; ps aux | sort +5nr | head

The output is sorted in descending order of the RSS (Resident Set Size) column which is the amount of process memory in RAM as opposed to the Virtual Size (VSZ) which includes swap. Use that information to determine which processes can be eliminated.

The default redhat V9 OS uses only about 10-15 meg, the rest of the memory goes to various applications as shown with ps.

Could someone link to or provide quick info on determing which processes under Services are important and which are decorative? The info provided in Services, while helpful, still makes me feel like I'm missing something.

I don't want to assume for RH9 that the more memory the process uses, the more important it is, as that assumption in Win NT would kill a lot of useful processes and keep a lot of losers.

I've read around the internet on this, and the recurring theme is that RH8 made for a "happy" machine and the update that is RH9 makes for a "sluggish" machine. Some folks are claiming that 512 MB of RAM is necessary for a RH9 machine to run at a decent clip. I'm not taking RH9 down a peg, just seeing what others think.

Thanks. Good thread, btw.

I agree, this is a potentially very usefull thread. I find RH9 a lot slower than I expected, and I'm running it on a P3 500Mhz with 512Meg RAM. Certainly a lot slower than when I boot W2K.

Tips on making it lean and mean would be most welcome!

I had similar problems on my XP2100 256MB machine, RH9.0 was slower than XP Pro. I wasn't really expecting much as both were running off slow HDDs but I did expect Linux to be faster.

The machine is now an XP2400 and I'm going to give Mandrake9.1 a go.

Hi DialETech,

I was thinking of Mandrake myself, although I wont get around to playing with it for a while.

I'd be interested to know what you think of it in comparison to RH9.

I was also thinking of checking out Fedora at some point

http://fedora.redhat.com/download/

Does anyone know if Fedora supports the live update mechanism of RH9?

I'll try to remember to post again here when I've got it running and let you know what I think

What would be the advantages to running Fedora over RH9? I've read the info at the Fedora website, but everything is so nondescript--the project's objectives in particular--that I can't figure out what they're trying to do.

I guess the super-newbie way to put things regarding Fedora is:

I don't get it.

or

Why?

Now I'm not too familiar with the windowing environments, but I believe that you can use a `lighter' one than KDE or Gnome. Maybe that will help. If anybody can recommend one of these, maybe that would be helpful.

Personally I had to just suck it up, and buy some more PC-133 memory. Which is just horrible to buy nowadays, but I'm not going to upgrade my motherboard just for that.

Including or exluding disk buffers? What does "free" report?

Check this article out: https://www6.software.ibm.com/develo...ion/l-redhat/?

It's from IBM. Sadly free registration is required, but it covers some good basic points for us Redhat users.

A little follow-up on my previous post.

I just found out from a guru buddy of mine, that he uses the following desktop environment on "slower" computers.

http://www.xfce.org/

It supposed to be a bit llighter on the computer as a whole. I'm going to install it this weekend, but I think that it may be a help in your situation.

Again, I'm looking for other people's input on this as well.

For a list of services - by no means comprehensive (or specific to Red Hat) - should be something of use though.

http://www.comptechdoc.org/os/linux/...lservices.html

Do you need printing, networking, anything scheduled ? ect ect - if not then those services are candidates to be not started on boot up.

A lighter Window manager is always a possibility if your concerned with resources - for Window managers

http://www.plig.org/xwinman/

I'm told ICE WM is a good lightweight window manager too:

http://www.icewm.org/

When I eventually get round to sorting out my installation I'll be giving it a shot.

Fedora is still in beta. I'm told the first release will be the equivalent of what RH10 would have been, but I think the general aim is to allow more frequent releases without the expense of physically taking it to market, i.e. packaging, manuals etc... every time one is made. Meanwhile, in between releases, for those of you who don't mind risks, the latest source or beta is always available. I don't know if it's releases will be subject to the same Quality Assurance standards as the traditional RH releases where. It would be a shame if they weren't as stability is an important factor.

In general though I agree, the water is muddy regarding exactly what comes with Fedora, and anyone going to the redhat website looking for RH10 wont have a clue whats going on - I speak from my own experience. It drove me to look at alternatives to RH (I suppose it's always good to know about the alternatives anyway). I came back to it because of it's reputation for stability and QA.

The presentation of Fedora could do with a shake-up, but then it's still early days yet - they are having to merge two big projects to make it. I hope they aren't going to shoot themselves in the foot.