[TriLUG] mandrake performance?

[Sinner from the Prairy]

On Friday 05 September 2003 12:16 pm, Jim Priest wrote:
> Installed Mandrake 9.1 last night on my box 

> It's an older box - 850mhz, Celeron PIII - 256mb RAM.  I did just a basic
> install - no web, firewall, etc.  Just Gnome, KDE and the basic office/web
> apps.  It seems REALLY slow opening up something like Galeon or Mozilla
> takes 10-15 seconds, sometimes longer - and I'm wondering whats the best
> thing to throw at it to speed it up?  I'm mostly used Linux on the server
> end and haven't messed much with it on the desktop so I'm not sure whats
> the best thing to do in order to improve performance?  Ram? Swap space?

I run MDK 9.1 on a K6-2-400 and 384MB RAM. And I run KDE 3.1.3, Mozilla and 
all the usual applications. It's OK on mine.

Mozilla, no matter the platform, is slow to start up.

As this is Linux, not windows, some tricks:

- Do not close the applications. Just minimize them. Linux will move their ram 
needs to the swap until needed, using RAM for running applications/

- Try Firebird, the light-weight version of Mozilla (same engine less the 
kitchen-sink)

- Also, check your network configuration:

* What's in your /etc/hosts file? You want something like :
127.0.0.1               localhost.localdomain localhost
192.168.1.1          mandrake.priest.org mandrake

* What's in your /etc/sysconfig/network file? You want, at least :
NETWORKING=yes
HOSTNAME=mandrake.priest.org
DOMAINNAME=priest.org


KDE and X rely heavily on network configuration. Mandrake 9.1 is known to have 
foobared the default network configuration (knwon "feature") that slows down 
KDE. 


> If I can speed it up I think I could leave it on there and move to Linux at
> home - I'm really impressed with the progress of Gnome/KDE!

If it's within your budget, add more RAM.

> Thanks,
> jim



Salut,
Sinner
-- 
Visit my website! http://www.ibiblio.org/sinner/ 
Running on Mandrake Linux 9.0 - Kernel  2.4.19smp  Linux User # 89976