I recently installed Mandrake 8.1 on a Pentium 150MMX with 48 Mb RAM, 4 meg video and 2GB hard disk. To my surprise, the performance in the GUI is mind-numbingly slow. It literally takes 5 minutes to boot, shells and 'windows' take several seconds to load, and the the poor old thing is basically chugging like it is in pain.

What blows my mind, is that I installed Mandrake replacing Win95, which while nowhere near lightning speed, performed significantly faster on this machine. Obviously I've done something wrong since I've been told by everyone that Linux performance at its worst is several time better than Windows, but I'm not sure what I did. As you can tell am I a total Linux newbie! Also, half my hd seems to be missing - bad partition? Thanks!

that is your problem.. a 150mhz, 48 megs, 4 meg video card.. that machine is slow.. X will need more to run.. you have to think to yourself, win95 is only 40 megs total install, mandrake 8.1 can be over 2 GB... it wasn't designed to run the GUI with a computer that old using linux or especially mandrake..
if you don't run the gui interface, i bet it runs fast at the command line..

-trickykid

Thanks for the reply trickykid. I recently tried out BeOS on this same machine and the performance was fantastic - are there any (gui) versions of Linux that can perform comparably, or with a computer with my specs is Win95 the only other option?

you can try a smaller window manager or desktop like for example:

blackbox, xfce, window maker.. are all smaller gui's that probably will be much faster than using gnome or kde..

-trickykid

Fluxbox, blackbox or Window Maker.

Linux will run very nicely on a machine like that (I have one similar running Fluxbox) but you can't load it down with a zillion things like KDE or GNOME will do.

there should be other window managers on the 'drake cds, both gnome and kde take a good amount of resources to run properly. try window maker, black box or icewm.

Yeah, linux is better performer than windows, and the things you heard are true, unfortunately, this is not GUI interaction perfrmence that was measured, it is a performence of little things that make the system tick, the core (kernel) of linux is by far leaves behind windows even on slower computers, think for a sec, if we are going to measure the performance of 2.0 GHz Pentium system running windows XP and Sun Blade 1000 with a single sparc 900 MHz with Solaris 8.0, you might say 2G is faster then 900M, wrong!!! Even Pentium 3G (which is not out yet for a several month from now) is falling behind sparc 900MHz.
And sorry for floating between linux and UNIX, but UNIX is a very close relative of linux.

No it isn't. I've got MDK (not 8.1 but 7.2, the idea is the same) on P120. It's running fast. Why? You don't need more than a half of the services that are starting at boot. Run linuxconf and remove the ones you don't need (Control panel -> Control service activity).
Then, the X part. Have a look at all window managers you have installed (or install all there are on MDK cds) and choose the one you like best. If you still have doubt between KDE and GNOME, choose GNOME (but without Nautilus).

Absolutely! To back up what Mara said further, Win 95 is built for one specific task: to provide you with a basic GUI desktop (insert evil vindictive about how poorly it performs this task).

The Linux distros come by default with mail servers, web servers, FTP servers, port watchers, firewalls, tons and tons of goop enough to turn your machine into its own mini-Yahoo.com or fly the space shuttle!

Lately, since disk, memory and clock cycles have gotten cheaper, the default has been to have a ton of this stuff running. If you shut off what you don't need, AND run a lightweight windowmanager, AND if you want to go berserk and run a little older and less bloated distro, AND re-compile your kernel really slim, Linux will leave flame trails out of your ethernet cable. Okay, maybe not, but it will probably outperform Be, maybe.

Cheers,

Finegan

haha flame trails out ethernet?? what if you're on a modem? ::sarcasm::

You're comparing apples to oranges.

To be fair, Mandy 8.* is equivalent to XP. And when you say Linux, it means the kernel. X is another piece of work. X runs on top of Linux. In a nutshell, X lets you do things in graphics.

Try running XP on your P150 box, if you ever manage to install it, which I doubt.

If you really want to take advantage of Linux, my advice is to get an older version of a popular distribution. Mandy 6.*. Then install X 3.3.6 at most and a simple WM like twm or afterstep.

I've heard a fair bit about older machines that can't handle new distros. Have you tried Xubuntu? I think that one works well on older computers, the only drawback is that it looks nothing like a familiar Windows desktop.

Hi,

You did look at the date for the original post.