On Wednesday 10 September 2003 16:01, Rodrigues wrote: > I've just installed mandrake linux 9.1 on my old toshiba laptop > (166mhz and 48meg of RAM). The installation and smoothly, I just had > to disable pcmcia configuration and the pcmcia daemon.
Well done the only way I got to do that was using txt or vgalo install. > > Before stating my problem(s) let me tell you what I want to do: mainly > text processing (LaTeX) and development (Python mainly, but also a > little bit of Java). So I will want to install the java jre, Python, > cvs, and the jedit editor which is may favourite. > > I have two major gripes with my installation: > > 1. The GUI looks horrible. Everything looks big and ugly. Several > windows (the mandrake configuration window for ex.) appear much bigger > than the available screen space. This is even more bizarre because the > GUI at the installation phase was looking mighty fine and dandy. I > tried to mess up with the resolutions and such but to no avail. Any > suggestions? Check what video-card you've got it's probably misconfigured. No big deal these older laptops don't always work well with XFree86 version 4. Mess with XFdrake to change the settings or tell us the specs. > 2. The system is horribly slow. I know I can't expect much from my > clunky laptop but before installing mandrake I had Win98 and it was > doing fairly ok. Any suggestions? (I've followed the guide's > suggestion and turned acpi off but I noted no significant difference). It'll remain fairly clunky especially in graphic mode even if you turn all services off. Get used to the commandline for speed or get a lot more ram (say 128M)if the laptop allows. > Any help (including RTFM with apropriate links ;-) is highly > appreciated. Jre will probably give the "coup de grace" when running. It'll make you remember Windows3.0 on a 386.....you get to brew a lot of cups of tea in between the clicks. Personally I'd stop short on Mdk7.2 with a laptop in that range but better yet: Try slackware9.0 if you want a more modern distro it'll give a good speed gain. Without the gui you can get even it running fairly on a 386 if need be. Do not (this is THE rule!) try gui's like KDE or Gnome (they guzzle RAM) but light weight ones like XFCE or ICEWM. There are more tricks but these are the starters. > > With my best regards, > G. Rodrigues You cannot compare mdk9.1 and win98. Mandrake got out of that league after 7.2 and compares to XP now. Good luck, HarM
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