As a newbie, I find Mandriva or Madrake (whatever it's called these days) is fantastic. It's a good comptetitor to windows in the home market for sure. The GUI is what we newbies need. However, does anyone else find it a tiny bit slow?? Why is that? I have used Debian 4 and it was faster. I have also used Linspire and find it slower. -Pete

The GUI is what we newbies need. However, does anyone else find it a tiny bit slow?? Why is that? I have used Debian 4 and it was faster. I have also used Linspire and find it slower. Yep, all those gui bells and whistles bog it down. I get into the KDE Control Center and disable Beagle and other KDE resorces/services. I hear the next release of KDE is supposed to be faster. I did notice it was faster when playing with Beta2 of the next Mandriva release. For speed check on my cheap on board  ATI Radeon XPRESS 200 64meg video hardware, I see glxgears showing 6558 _frame_s in 5.0 seconds = 1311.575 FPS

As a newbie, I find Mandriva or Madrake (whatever it's called these days) is fantastic. It's a good comptetitor to windows in the home market for sure. The GUI is what we newbies need. However, does anyone else find it a tiny bit slow?? Why is that? I have used Debian 4 and it was faster. I have also used Linspire and find it slower. -Pete KDE, the default window manager is loaded with features and so its a large application and takes time to load and uses lots of ram. I've never used it on a regular basis for just that reason. Try IceWM or one of the smaller desktop managers that will load and run almost immediately. Another problem may be your disk drive. Make sure DMA is turned on and its performing as it should. man hdparm. If it's not installed, you'll have to install it. And lastly, Mandriva is precompiled for a multitude of hardware. The size of the kernel has almost doubled in the last 6 years. You could recompile it and delete support for harware you don't have and cut the size of the kernel dramatically. Is it worth it? I'm not sure. I did it once a few years back and cut the kernel size considerably, but you'd have to do it everytime you upgraded, so I wouldn't call it practical for the average user. Good luck.

As a newbie, I find Mandriva or Madrake (whatever it's called these days) is fantastic. It's a good comptetitor to windows in the home market for sure. The GUI is what we newbies need. However, does anyone else find it a tiny bit slow?? Why is that? I have used Debian 4 and it was faster. I have also used Linspire and find it slower. -Pete KDE, the default window manager is loaded with features and so its a large application and takes time to load and uses lots of ram. I've never used it on a regular basis for just that reason. Try IceWM or one of the smaller desktop managers that will load and run almost immediately. Another problem may be your disk drive. Make sure DMA is turned on and its performing as it should. man hdparm. If it's not installed, you'll have to install it. And lastly, Mandriva is precompiled for a multitude of hardware. The size of the kernel has almost doubled in the last 6 years. You could recompile it and delete support for harware you don't have and cut the size of the kernel dramatically. Is it worth it? I'm not sure. I did it once a few years back and cut the kernel size considerably, but you'd have to do it everytime you upgraded, so I wouldn't call it practical for the average user. Good luck. Thanks for the answers. I have 512 RAM. Is that adequate for Mandriva? I also have a Pentium IV. I downloaded the i586 DVD which is supposed to be optimized for that class of machine, but what the heck?? -Pete

As a newbie, I find Mandriva or Madrake (whatever it's called these days) is fantastic. It's a good comptetitor to windows in the home market for sure. The GUI is what we newbies need. However, does anyone else find it a tiny bit slow?? Why is that? I have used Debian 4 and it was faster. I have also used Linspire and find it slower. -Pete I found 2006.0 faster than 2007.0 and 2007.0 faster than 2007.1. I don't really know why. The harddrive is slower. 2008.0 beta is really fast. We all hope that 2008.0 will be the new Mandriva speed reference. I'm not sure about the final release. Regards

Thanks for the answers. I have 512 RAM. Is that adequate for Mandriva? I also have a Pentium IV. I downloaded the i586 DVD which is supposed to be optimized for that class of machine, but what the heck?? -Pete 512M worked fine for me running a few servers and mythtv. Check your swap file (free command) and see if it's being used much. There are lots of P4's. Some of the older ones are pretty slow, but the cpu is just one part of system performance. After a fresh boot, open Open office and time it. Close it and reopen it and time it again. The difference in time is what the HDD is costing you as it will load from cache the second time. Install hdparm and check your drive speeds. These are typical; [root@wes2 wes]# hdparm -tT /dev/hda /dev/hda:  Timing cached reads:   2048 MB in  2.00 seconds = 1023.90 MB/sec  Timing buffered disk reads:  112 MB in  3.00 seconds =  37.27 MB/sec [root@wes2 wes]# hdparm -tT /dev/md0 /dev/md0:  Timing cached reads:   2416 MB in  2.00 seconds = 1208.51 MB/sec  Timing buffered disk reads:  450 MB in  3.01 seconds = 149.62 MB/sec [root@wes2 wes]# hda is a single 120GB 7200rpm WD drive. md0 is a 2 sata 320GB Seagate raid 0 array. If you're not close to the speed of hda, then you need to find out why.