Hello All
I have just installed Ubuntu Edgy Eft on a PII 300Mhz, 300+Mb RAM machine which is used soley for the purpose of web browsing and some document editing. Turns out the machine is very slow running just Firefox.
One user even described it as "being back on dial-up"(The machine is on broadband and the bandwidth is fine).
I have tried fluxbox instead of gnome but the performance difference is marginal and the refresh rate of the monitor returns to 65H.
The users have minimal experience so I'm looking to keep it user friendly as well.

I may have to resort to reinstalling Win95 again otherwise. Oh, and k3b/nautilus spews any cd back at me when trying to burn data so trying Knoppix is out of the question..

What can I do to speed it up? Anyway to let it know I only need the bare processes?

Well, Ubuntu is really designed for more recent hardware and the very old hardware might not be able to support the software considering want or need. You might want to look into other distros such as damn small linux or vector.

Everyone thinks that linux runs on all hardware just fine and dandy but install all honesty this thought is not true.

I'm told XUbuntu with XFCE interface is supposed to be lightweight and 'Slow System' friendly.
I've got Ubunutu running on a P3-500 Notebook ok. My old P2-300 notebook (256Ram) Ran Suse 9.3 quite happily maybe try getting hold of an older distrubution with less performance hungry applications / window managers, steer well clear of KDE though, that'll really kill its perforamnce.

using apt-get I have installed xfce and xubuntu-desktop. Not sure about how merely installing xubuntu-desktop has helped but xfce is now set as the default Window Manager. There is a difference but only marginally.

Thanks all.

Check out the following link, it may be of some help.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/In...wMemorySystems

I've heard that Seamonkey has less memory usage than Firefox. Try it.

How big is your hard drive? Given the era of your processor, its probably in the 6-10gig range. Given whatever files, extra programs, etc, you may have installed, you might be filling up your hard drive space with both GUI's installed.

I have a 1ghz Laptop that I had ubuntu on, before removing it and installing Xubuntu, and the more I use it, the more I see that it does seem to use less resources and work a little better. It might behoove you to consider just installing Xubuntu and removing Ubuntu.

http://www.xubuntu.com

IGF

I installed ubuntu edgy recently on my amd athlon 2400+ and it's ridiculously slow, like nothing I've ever run on this machine. I only have 256 megs of ram, and some of that is taken by on board video, but prior to ubuntu I was running knoppix 3.6 which uses the KDE window manager, and even featured transparancies, and it ran way, waaaaay quicker and smoother. Before that it was slackware with gnome or kde, and I had no real serious performance complaints other than I couldn't run mixxx with low enough latency.

With ubuntu, I had a browser running, wine, and xmms, and it started cranking the hard drive for a few minutes straight. XMMS stalled and I couldn't do anything until it was done what it was doing, probably swapping I suspect because my Ram is usually full. I have tons of swap available btw. There seems to be quite a few process running with ubuntu, I don't know exactly how it compares to knoppix.

I suppose ubuntu was designed with a lot more ram in mind, it just seems odd that knoppix and slackware ran just fine. How much more back ground stuff could there be? Unfortunately ubuntu is the only distro in which I can get a much needed application to run in wine and I like to be as M$ free as possible.

Could you tell us what exactly WHAT is running slow. I just had a very jerky mouse on an PIII 450MHz with Ubuntu. When using a USB mouse, it was running fine. Also IndyGunFreak is right: startup times are probably due to the hard drive. Upgrading the same machine too a 7200rpm HD due to insufficient memory did give a significant performance boost at startup (OS and programs). Firefox is running reasonably fast here. It's true however that the machine is quickly overcharged when doing several thins at the same time. Depending on what your want to do, offering a little upgrade to this machine could be a good idea (used stuff of this era is very inexpensive these days).

On my side, everything. The machine is just slow. The mouse tracks fine when the system is idle, but it doesn't take much to make it choke. Opening any application at all is very slow (terminal, browser, media players, etc.) and then they run slowly. Scrolling down a web page is very choppy. And if I scroll down while music is playing, the music will get choppy too.

glxgears, without any other applications on the go, looked like it was doing 1 frame per second. I have considered dropping a big wad of ram into it, but I'd rather not spend any money I don't have too, far too much of that going on already. Although it lacks straight forward package management, I may have to see if the latest slackware will run wine and my win app okay. I hear slack 11 is out now.

I'm running Ubuntu Dapper (6.06) on a PIII/733Mhz w/384Mb RAM & 18Gb HDD. I chose Dapper for two reasons:

1) I read a review where the reporter claimed to have installed it on "antique PC's with only 192 Mb RAM with no performance problems".

2) It's the latest LTS version of Ubuntu.

Personally, I run XMMS, Realplayer 10, Xine movie player, and Graveman CD burner with no problem. It's faster than Win98 on same machine. XP was a joke- only tried it for a day.

Well Dapper won't help much. There must be some bottleneck on TenEighty's machine (CPU?) that just slows it down. The number of Ram isn't the only factor. I was able to install Xubuntu Edgy on a Pentium 166MHz with 256MB of Ram, believe me, it is slow (but it works)! The solution are to either use Win9x and to cope with all the security/privacy/drivers/IE problems or to use a primitive distribution like DSL (Damn Small Linux) wich would run fine on the same 166MHz machine ... except for Firefox which was somewhat slow ... or to find the bottleneck.

My advice would be to open the System Monitor and to see what happens to the CPU when using the machine. If it's up all the time at 100% when using it, a used PII 450MHz or a PIII (check your mainboard supports those) should make a difference. They are really cheap these days, with shipping costing more than CPU ...

I've been running Xubuntu 6.10 w/XFCE on a AMD 700MHZ with 512 ram and it runs beautiful. Workspace 1 can have Firefox with many tabs open. Workspace 2 runs Amarok media player. Workspace 3 usually has an RDP session open to a PC at my work. Again all this runs simultaneous with no problems.

You could probably try adding ram. I got an older computer with 128mb of ram. It takes like 5 minutes just to get to the desktop.

I'm running 6.10 on a Celeron 366 with 256MB and an 80GB drive, even using a wireless mouse. Everything works fine. Not a speed demon obviously but perfectly usable.