> I have now come to the stage where I wish to
> commercially (yet freely) bundle Mandrake Linux
> on systems that I sell. However I find Mandrake
> (as well as Suse, Red Hat, Corel, Turbo, Storm
> and more) very slow. I have settled on Mandrake
> due to its extremely stable nature (no hanging
> & system malfunction in over 40 days of use).
> The systems that I wish to sell are presently
> Cyrix 333 Mhz, 512K Cache, 32MB Ram, 4.2GB Hard
> Disk & AT25 VGA card, CD rom without sound
> card, for typical office use.
It's good to see Mandrake bundled. Decent specs,
although the memory seems a bit low for today's
standards.
> Yet the systems are slooooooow. I have tried
> 'hdparm', removed daemons and other startups I
> dont need, increased swap size, removed
> unwanted installed rpm's, but its of no use.
> The same systems function excellently (as far
> as speed goes) on Windows-95. Star office takes
> aeons to load, and if I try development tools
> like AnyJ, then the system almost stops.
I'm guessing you've disabled a lot of the
unneeded services (PCMCIA and many others..)? I
won't be the only one to tell you that StarOffice
(at least version 5.1) is a SEVERE resource hog.
Have you tried 5.2? I would not be surprised if
doubling the memory (64MB) made a huge
difference, have you tried that yet?
> I have been under the impression that linux is
> not as demanding on resources as Windows,
> MS-Office & Visual Studio. Where have I gone
> wrong?
This impression is correct, but it takes quite a
bit of stripping unneeded junk to get it down to
the point where you really see a difference.
That's one of the benefits of Linux, you can
strip it down. You can't do that with Windows.
> Please help. As a Windows user I have come to
> love & appreciate Linux, but I am now at my
> wits end. If I need to spend more on hardware
> like memory & SCSI drives then a large part of
> the desire to switch to Linux (at least on the
> Desktop) will be negated.
I would hate to see a converted Windows user go
back home. I would recommend trying a little
more memory, though. The rest of the hardware
specs seem more than adequate. Depending on what
you're using the systems for, it's possible
there's more things that can be disabled/removed
that you don't know about. Your current GUI
setup may also need to be tweaked to remove added
features that you really don't need/use that are
taking up vital resources. There's a lot of
possibilities.
Don Head [[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Linux Mentor [1 314 692-1942]
Wave Technologies, Inc. [1 800 826-4640 x1942]
[AIM - Don Wave][ICQ - 18804935][Yahoo - Don_Wave]
