I have a comment about my slackware 9.0... i like the learning curve even though it is pretty steep for a newbie like me... but i find it kind of slower than windows... could that be just me? for example when i am in gnome and i open up directories it is quite slow... and also i use mplayer to view movie files... and some mpg files won't play past 5 seconds... and in the mplayer doc it says that it might be my "slow computer"... i tried it in the text command line also but it would not play and in windows ALL files play... i do not find a faster improvement in speed... are there any ways to speed up slackware?

i have a 1.5 ghz amd athlon with 128mb of ram... and a 80gb harddrive... (i dont think it is my computer)

There's a few ways to fine-tune the box...

check
hdparm /dev/hdX (your drive letters)
hdparm -tT /dev/hdX

Use a lean WM that consumes less RAM
...

Remove stuff you don't need from your
rc.modules and rc.M files ...

Mplayer can be a bit nasty at times, and
complained to me about slow CPU on a
box that plays any DVD's without troubles
with Ogle...

I found that the mplayer that comes as a
ready-to-use slackware package from
linuxpackages doesn't work properly for
me, I d/led the source and all required(and
optional :}) packages and compiled them
myself .... a major improvement ;)


Cheers,
Tink

I have found that FVWM2 and FVWM95 run much faster than windows. They are not very pretty so you might not like that, but I am really impressed with their speed. Also, as far as I can tell Windows 98 looks almost exactly like FVWM2, IceWM and WindowMaker. Keramik and Metacity are both highly graphically intense themes that just take longer to load based on their eye candy. It is more balanced to compare GNOME 2.x or KDE 3.x with Windows XP because they look about the same.

oic... but are there any "tweaks" i can do to linux that will boost the speed?... i dont understand how to do the rc.modules stuff and take out the stuff that arent important i am a noob!

I agree with Tinkster. Unused device drivers (that's a driver for a piece of hardware that you don't have) can really slow down the boot process as well as the general speed of the system. Take a look inside /etc/rc.d/rc.modules and see if all the uncommented device driver lines are things that you actually use.
Here's one example:
If you are booting with the scsi.i kernel image when you actually have no scsi devices, the computer will search for a SCSI device even though one isn't there. This process may cause the boot sequence to slow to a crawl at times and also may make your system run a lot slower, too (even though you seem to have a super computer). The rc.modules files is extremely well commented and has a lot of pointers written right into it. You should get some good ideas from there. And maybe try FVWM just once Remember that FVWM95 was meant at first to be a "lookalike" to Windows 95.
I hope that will help a little bit.

dma for your hard drive isn't enabled by default. To check this issue the command:

hdparm -d /dev/hda

and if it says dma is 0 then it's disabled. To enable it (you must be root):

hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda

you can also issue the command that Tinkster stated above to see the speed difference:

hdparm -tT /dev/hda

Issue that command before enabling dma then after to see what a big difference dma makes.

Linux generally is slower than windows. With a stock slack 9 install the only thing uncommented in rc.modules is ide-scsi. Only thing you can really do is use a slightly quicker window manager like fluxbox, enlightenment, etc. Either way, linux is slower. And definitely compile everything yourself, i dont mess with pre compiled stuff unless thats all that is available.

For gnome, if you feel adventurous, you can try out garnome. It downloads and compiles the latest gnome. You will for sure see a speed increase in that. Also, it doesnt interfere with your exising gnome install.

I think saying "linux is usually slow then windows" is quite a rediculous statement.

I will agree that X and KDE sometimes are slower then windows. However, as far as things like serving web pages, delivering mail, database servers, scripting, and compiling linux isn't just sometimes faster, sometimes it is WAY faster.

In linux I find it way faster. Especially connecting to the Internet. I am able to download at 5.2KBps consintently in Linux but in Windows I am lucky to get 3.2. To me this is a huge difference considering I am living with dialup.

how about viewing movies?... wat program do u guys use to view movies? do u find it faster or slower than windows?

I use mplayer to view most of my movies. I can watch DVD's no problem on my PIII 550 with 768 MB of RAM.

In general the movie playback isn't neccesarily as fast, but it can be if you get the commercial video products. For one, TIVO's and ReplayTV's both run Linux.

I noticed, that GNOME (specially Dropline Gnome) is significantly slower then KDE. The same applications open up much faster in KDE than in Gnome. Why is this?
Is there any way to speed up Gnome?

Another note about video, Linux uses all open-source software algorithms for the most part to display video. There are cases where this ins't true, like I use a Hollywood+ and mplayer outputs to that, I assume in raw MPEG2 format where possible.

WIndows on the other hand relies on the very expensive commercial software algorithms that linux cannot use because they won't let the source be seen (TIVO's and the like use these algorithms because they don't have to distribute that portion of there source). Windows also uses some special graphics card features that linux often doesn't.

You could certainly get a commercial video player for linux that would increase speed but you would have to pay for it, and possibly pay a lot since the only way I have seen one packaged is in a form made for distributing with a product such as a Tivo or ZapStation. The possible reason there are no cheaper, one license players, is most software companies don't think it is viable to sell software for Linux.

So to answer you question, the video in WIndows vs. the open source movie players for linux is faster. However, there is a reason that virtually every commercial grade video product without a special propietary operating system on it runs Linux these days. And that reason is the base OS is more efficient at process and resource managment, the TOC is way cheaper on a machine in which the user doesn't interact with the OS except through a custom applciation, and linux can be way more light weight.

Windows, even Windows NT and 2000, are not multi-user operating systems in the same sense that Linux is. A 2 GHz machine, used only as a workstation, may indeed seem faster when running Windows than it does running Slackware (although it may also seem quicker to crash when running Windows as well).

Try this, however: configure a 233 MHz machine with about 256 MB RAM as an XDMCP application server running KDE 3.x and OpenOffice, and have about 5 people log in remotely over the network with an "X -query server-ip" command, and have them all run OpenOffice at the same time while you watch "top" from the server's local console. Then decide whether Windows is faster under extreme load than Slackware.

Windows is like a cheaply built car from the 1960's with a big engine and a three-speed transmission, and Linux is like a modern 50 passenger bus with a moderately large diesel engine and a ten speed transmission. A comparison of "speed" doesn't really address their relative capabilities, although it is perhaps ironic that the Linux "bus" costs little or nothing, while the Windows "tin can" is quite expensive.

I really like that analogy. It is similar to one somebody told me once 3 years back when I was starting to consider linux. He said Windows is like a Honda that costs as much as a BMW and Linux is like a 3/4 ton diesel pickup that gets 100 miles to the gallon, can tow 10,000lbs and costs pennies to purchase.