Hi everyone,

After installing Red Hat 8.0 I couldn't help but be impressed by the GUI. Making it that much easier for Windows folks - like me - to get up and running quickly.

But I am wondering.....

Why is Red Hat 8.0 so incredibly slow at running on my system?

For example Open Office takes 5-10 minutes to just show up!! On Windows it takes less than 1. I haven't timed it mind you but that's what it seems like.

The GUI programs that I execute under Red Hat take quite a while to come up.

Under Windows most of them come up quite quickly.

How is it that all else being equal that a Linux distro can be so much slower than Windows? Is it that the code that runs under Linux is doing a lot of things inefficiently?
Is it GNOME in particular?

Is it possible to use a Windows manager under Linux that will run at least as quickly as Windows does? As it is Linux is nice to play around in but I don't know how good it's going to be to get any real work done. It's so S-L-O-W.....

I am running it on a Pentium 200 Mhz with 64 MB ram. Now I know that some folks have recommended that I not run Red Hat on such an old system but the question still remains....

All else being equal how can Linux (Red Hat 8.0) run so incredibly slower than Windows? On the same machine?

Compared to Windows 95 (which I am running on my system) Linux seems like some kind of slow tortoise! Why is that?

And if GNOME is why, then again why is that so. I mean it's a GUI like Windows. Can't GNOME do things as quickly as Windows can? Is it possible that Windows in this respect runs more efficiently and uses less resources than GNOME?

Any insight would be appreciated. I'm stumped as to the reason why GNOME should run so much slow than Windows. I mean Windows seems to do a lot more than GNOME and yet runs circles around it in terms of speed.

Carlos

No, it's your hardware probably can't handle it. When new games come out, do things work better just because the software is new? No, you need the hardware to go along with it.

If you tried to run Windows XP with that hardware you'd notice the same slowness. Try getting like the first release of red hat. Really though, your hardware SUCKS.

You're trying to run software that is far beyond your hardware.

Windows 95 is old.

RH 8 is 2002.

Like leeman said, that's like comparing UT2K3 to Quake on your system.

I guess I hadn't thought about comparing GNOME to Windows XP instead of Windows 95. Your right about Windows XP probably running real slow on my system too though I will never find out until I buy a new system (that comes with XP).

There must be a whole lot more going on under GNOME than meets the eye. I had the impression that it was just a windows manager. Nothing more and nothing less. Which if so would make the comparison with Windows 95 much more reasonable in terms of hoping that GNOME would run at least - as - fast if not more so.

Given that Win 95 can do all the nice window stuff that GNOME seems to be able to do too.

If GNOME is indeed what is slowing Red Hat down I guess I will try out some of the other window managers and see if they might be as fast or faster than at least windows 95.

If the Linux kernel itself is so full of processing power that it runs slow on my system I guess there won't be much I can do. Other than to buy a new system that is .

Thanks again for your all's input.

Carlos

I'd suggest a no-frills window manager to ease the load a bit. Try fluxbox from http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net without heavy wallpapers and stuff. Use serviceconf to disable every service but the ones you cant live without. Well pretty much anything would choke the 64MB, so try to make the best use of what you have.

Deinately look at a flux/black box if you're running on older hardware. Recent versions of gnome and KDE can be a bit hoggish. You should also check that you aren't running services you don't need (do yu really need to run apache on a desktop box?)

As well you could probably do some kernel tuning to let XFree use Direct Rendering based on your graphics hardware along with MTRR support.

You will then need to tell XFree (via XF86Config) to use that access method.

Thanks very much for your additional input.

I disabled all the services that sounded like I didn't need them like NFS file mounting and all kinds of other things. Although it didn't really make any real difference.

I looked at the system diagnostics and according to what I was seeing the file explorer Nautilus alone took up a whopping 40% (give or take) of my CPU processing power! Could have been less I don't quite remember the exact number but it was up there.

It took me all of half an hour to just try and install the Galeon browser through the Red Hat RPM manager. It went through analyzing every single package I had on my system before installing Galeon. Then when I tried to start Galeon it said that some kind of Galeon config file was missing or otherwise not correct. So much for Galeon I guess. For now .

I am still trying to install Opera but am missing a file that it's dependent on. An lixxm.so.2.

Although I can see the points that were made about running on an older system I have still been left with the impression that Linux has a very long way to go before being able to really be a contender on the average desktop. I mean how much processing power does it take to open up a text file? Or to start a browser?

Open Office takes forever to open up under GNOME. It opens up in less than a minute under Windows 95.

I suppose that as I learn to use the command line more and more things will speed up considerably. At least that was my experience using RPM. MUCH faster going through the command line than sitting around waiting for the GUI to come up.

I'll keep plugging away for sure but even though I have been wanting to get away from Windows for some time I am also beginning to appreciate the reasons why it has become the predominant OS on desktops.

I mean how much easier can it be than clicking on a executable under Windows that gets installed together will all programs needed. For all it's faults you certainly got to give Microsoft a pat in the back for making things as easy as possible.

Anyway I will look up that Window manager you all mentioned. Now if I can just figure out how to install it and get it running .

Thanks again.

Carlos

I ran redhat 8 on a 233 with 96 MB RAM. It wasn't great but it was certainly tolerable. Maybe you can track down some old Ramsticks to throw in your box....

Linux is a very powerful operating system. It far surpases Win95 in power and customizability, especially with the newest stable releases. The one downside of that is that it takes more resources, as today more resources are generally always available. It is Gnome that is most likely slowing down your system. You want to edit a text file quickly? open a terminal, or quit X, and type 'vi textfile' (where 'textfile' is a text file) and hit enter. It will open in less than a second, and you'll be editing text. Now, if you want the formatting/font whatever of OpenOffice, there are alternatives to the OpenOffice suite that will take less resources, but again, less options will be available for you because of this. Today you can get a 2ghz system with 256mb ram for a couple hundred dollars(i suggest you look into that!) sites such as www.newegg.com and www.tigerdirect.com will let you pick your hardware, and they're usually pretty cheap. If you don't buy a new system, at least take the time to spend $30 on doubling or tripling your ram, because I suspect that will substantially help your system.

'Linux' doesn't take more resources... but bloated GUIs will sink ya. And it's also a bit much to compare Gnome or KDE3.x to Win 95. Give fvwm95 a whirl, it;s a liteweight and looks kinda familiar. I wouldn't run RH8, SuSE8.x, or Mandy 9 default installs on anything less than a PIII600+ and that's with a minimum of 256MB RAM.

Did you get disks or download a disk image? If you downloaded a disk image did you run a checksum on it? The only problem I've ever had with a really slow running distro was one I didn't run a checksum and had a corrupted disk image. It would take forever to load, then run like a slideshow.

Thanks to everone's input again. I am definitely looking into using a different windows manager. Fluxbox looks like what I want but I have not yet figured out how to replace GNOME with it on Red Hat (but that's another issue).

Yes I downloaded the ISO and ran md5 check sums on them all. They all came up just fine. I then burned them to CD and after letting Red Hat check the media I installed from them. I doubt it's the installation CD's.

And I seriously doubt that despite the power and flexibility of the Linux kernel that it's doing so much more than Windows 95 ever did that it would slow my system down to a crawl. Mandrake 7.1 ran just fine in terms of speed but the GUI? Absolute YUK!

I imagine the kernel from Mandrake 7.1 wasn't that much less capable than the kernel in Red Hat.

I think the problem is GNOME from some of the newsgroup and forum postings that I have been reading. On a super duper fast system with lots of RAM inefficient actions on the part of GNOME don't really show up in terms of slowing the system down. But on a slow system, every extra read or write to disk. every extra item logged, every needless redraw of the screen, every attempt to run a program in the background that doesn't want to open, all show up in a slowed GUI.

Even if I bought a brand new system from the looks of things I doubt I could get GNOME to be THAT much faster than even Windows 95. It might be as good but I don't think it would blaze away across the screen. At least in terms of the GUI. I might get OpenOffice to open up in even 2 or 3 minutes instead of 5. But that would still be less than the 1 it takes Windows 95 to open it in.

Of course that's all conjecture and I guess I won't know until I buy a new system. For now since Windows 95 is working quite well for me I will not fork out the money just to see if I can get Red Hat to move faster. At least not until I have tried other things like switching window managers.

And maybe becoming far more acquainted with the command line. Things are certainly FAST there! No question about that (so again it can't be the kernel running on a slow system).

Anyway just some further thoughts.

Thanks very much to everyone's wonderful input. It REALLY helps! Linux wouldn't get anywhere at all without the willingness of one's like you all to help out a less experienced person like myself.

Carlos

It some times helps if you run the OpenOffice.org repair tool. It cut my OO load time by 50%!

I also have a P200. MDK 7.2, Redhat 6.0 and 7.0 all ran well with 128MB ram - Konqueror and Opera up in 5-6 secs. I tested with 64mb and it was swapping all the time (with gui). Anything with KDE 3 (Mdk 9 or Slack8.1) was way too slow even with 128MB ram. I have done alot of work in text mode (before startx) and it is lightning fast and especially useful with the multiple desktop feature (Alt-F1,F2,F3...) Lynx is pretty cool once you get used to it.

BTW: The KDE desktop in MDK 7.2 looks good to me

RAM! get some steenkin RAM!!!

if you want to keep the old pentium then ebay some ram, if you can find some that works for your old motherboard it will probably cost more to get it shipped to you than to win the auction.

My server is a dual PPro200 with 196MB and it does OK if I want to jump on the net quick without firing up my desktop computer. I've actually had it doing kernel crunch in a terminal while surfing the net, didn't do too bad. And I don't surf like your grandpa, I surf like kelly slater; as an example right now I have 3 of my 4 virtual desktops used with 4 different browser windows up and a few with multiple tabs open and I consider this light surfing. Some day I'll have to pull a couple sticks of ram out just to see if its ram or 2 cpus that makes it tolerable.