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Re: What Puts the Bloat in Mandrake 8.1
- To: Shlomi Fish <shlomif(at-nospam)techst02.technion.ac.il>
- Subject: Re: What Puts the Bloat in Mandrake 8.1
- From: Tzafrir Cohen <tzafrir(at-nospam)technion.ac.il>
- Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2001 19:27:45 +0200 (IST)
- cc: Linux-IL Mailing List <linux-il(at-nospam)linux.org.il>
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- In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.33.0111201848390.27049-100000@techst02.technion.ac.il>
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On Tue, 20 Nov 2001, Shlomi Fish wrote:
>
> Hi all.
>
> I installed Mandrake 8.1 on my friend's computer which is a Pentium 200
> MHz with 256 MB of RAM. I used Kernel 2.4.x, XFree86 4.1.0 and the rest of
> the default MDK configuration. We used Vanilla IceWM as the desktop.
>
> >From some reason, it ran very sluggishly. After we downgraded to RedHat
> 6.1, it ran perfectly fine, even with GNOME or KDE.
>
> So the question is: what caused the fact that the newer configuration ran
> more slowly than the older one, despite the fact that it used a much more
> lightweight desktop environment. Was it the new XFree86? The newer Kernel
> (2.4.x vs. 2.2.x)? Or what?
If you suspect XFree: What display adapter?
Generally XFree 4 is not more slugish.
Have you checked for unnecessary servers? What were the main CPU and
memory consumers?
Did you check KDE programs? Keep in mind that a kde program (like
konqueror) brings up all of the KDE "daemon processes" with it.
Have you tried an icewm there that only uses solid backgrounds (and not
gradients and bitmaps)? I'm not sure how much this has an effect with a
P200.
One thing that may make mandrake appear slugish sometimes is anacron:
anacron runs the last cron.hourly, cron.daily, cron.weekly and
cron.monthly cron jobs that were missed (because the system was not
running, or not running linux) at a later time. "a later time" is sometime
after the next time the computer boots.
So the first time you run Mandrake in a day it may run some "heavy" cron
jobs such as locate's updatedb (goes over the whole directory tree).
Have you tried diposing of kdm and using a non-graphical login?
I believe that this is a non-issue, but I keep seeing a "kdeapm" (or
something similar) process taking ~80% CPU with priority 20 on a friend's
machine with Mandrake 8.0, that loggs into icewm.
>
> Since the machine is not connected to the Internet, and my friend only
> uses it for a university course, which does not require all the software
> to be the most up-to-date, it is not critical that he will run the older
> distro. But, still I'd hate to think that Linux is becoming as bloated as
> Windows does.
Still, a good C++ compiler may be relevant to your friend. I believe that
recent linux distros have a better c++ compiler. Other than that, it is
indeed not that important.
BTW: Keep in mind that cygwin also includes gcc.
--
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:tzafrir@technion.ac.il
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir
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