On 20 Nov, Bourdon, Bruce wrote:
> I have Red Hat Linux 7 running on a Pentium P1 200 with 32 MB Ram and 8 GB
> hard drive.
>
> I noticed that the hard drive LED was flickering about once a second while
> in X (witnessed in KDE and GNOME) but goes away if I exit X Windows.
>
> I left the system alone in X for hours Saturday. When I returned the hard
> drive was running continuously and it took about ten seconds for the mouse
> pointer to move in response to physically moving the mouse.
>
> Any Ideas?
>
> Also, I had Win95 on this box (still got it on a seperate drive) & browsing
> there is MUCH faster than Linux/Netscape.
>
> Does this make sense?
>
> Bruce.
Yes, it makes sense. You have all the classic symptoms of not
enough memory. Your problem is right here:
> I have Red Hat Linux 7 running on a Pentium P1 200 with 32 MB Ram and 8 GB
^^
and
> in X (witnessed in KDE and GNOME)
^^^ ^^^^^
If you use "free" or "top" to find out how much memory you're using,
I'll bet you find it is way over 32 MB. Neither KDE nor Gnome is very
lightweight as far as the memory footprint goes - I had a PowerMac with
16MB that used KDE as the default desktop, and I'm pretty sure that it
was using 48MB immediately after boot. Admittedly, I think that
machine was using more memory than an x86 machine would, because it was
that weird Linux-on-top-of-a-Mach-microkernel design, but not by more
than about 2 megabytes. When you add Netscape to the mix, I think
you're hitting swap space constantly.
You may want to look into using one of the lighter weight GUIs instead
of KDE or Gnome - e.g. use blackbox or WindowMaker. They won't be
anywhere near as feature-full, but then again, they won't put you into
swap space instantly, either.
--
Stephen Ryan Debian GNU/Linux
Technology Coordinator
Center for Educational Outcomes,
C. Everett Koop Institute at Dartmouth College
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