On Thu 10 May 2007 14:47:24 NZST +1200, Robert Fisher wrote: > I discussed, with Volker, on Tuesday, that I quite liked Suse 10.2 but > ditched > it because it was so sluggish every time it started while it was looking for > updates. Volker admitted that it is a problem in 10.2 and thinks it is fixed > in 10.3.
The issue is only partially specific to SUSE. In general, everyone wants a Linux system which works out by itself whether there are any important updates available which need to be installed. There are not many ways to achieve this, you'll have to run a check-for-updates program either by cron or when the user logs in. Cron is neat because it can run programs at 3 in the morning. Trouble is, on desktops which are turned off after work 03:00 turns into never, or if the particular cron reschedules on boot, people complain that the box is so slow booting. You could run it when the user logs in, and people complain it's slow to log in. You could wait 1h after login, and people complain that their box randomly runs so slow... So the only winner(?) is not to automatically check for updates. Sure you want that? (There's an off switch for that, btw) Specific to SUSE is that a package resolution run is very slow and very resource hungry. For starters, uninstall zenworks/zmd and use yast/zypper. (10.3 will have zenworks relegated to SLES.) Next thing is to wait for more speed improvements (there have been several). If you want more than that Right Now, turn off the auto-update check, or use another distro. I have 10.3 alpha4 here (released 3 days ago), both 32bit and 64bit, if anyone wants to have a play. This is a development release - not meant for production use! > Mepis installs in only about 15 minutes and just works. I always find this kind of statement good to impress Microsofties, but completely useless for comparing Linux distros. Without any doubt most of the time is taken up by decompressing packages and writing a gazillion files to disk. I.e. it's directly related to the amount of software you selected to install (or which was preselected for you). It's also dependent on your installation source - it takes longer to random-read files from DVD than from a fast LAN server, but not as long as over xtra adsl. And surely, the bunzip2 runs at the same speed regardless of distro... Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
