I’m a long-time, frustrated Windows user. I have tried various Linux distributions in the past, but I haven’t been satisfied with any of them. Today, I went out and bought Red Hat Linux 8.0 from Office Depot for $40. I am a dial-up internet user and I consider myself computer literate, although I don’t have much experience using Linux on the desktop. I do however, have some experience using Linux and FreeBSD as a server (no GUI).
I was excited to see all the positive, glowing reviews of the latest version of Red Hat Linux. I thought, “finally, I can get away from Windows 98.” “It just works” is the mantra. Unfortunately, this was not the case for me.
I tried two different computers. The first one was my laptop, a Toshiba 2595CDT. Installation was easy, all the hardware was detected flawlessly (even the USB mouse, which Windows 98 was never able to recognize). Installation of the “desktop” system took just over an hour. The computer is a Celeron 400a with 64MB of RAM and a 4.3GB hard drive.
[Editor In Chief’s Note: The RAM for this machine does not meet the requirements of Red Hat 8.0 towards X11.]
Once the system was booted, I was surprised to see that GNOME was so slow, it was useless. It took a full 5 minutes for Open Office Writer to load up. It took a minute for a window to show up when I double-clicked on the ‘home’ icon. I’m sorry, but there’s no way I can use a system like this, I can’t get any work done.
I clicked here and there looking for ways to speed the system up. I turned off “animations,” but it didn’t do anything. What I mean is, all the windows and whatnot were still animated. I found a “services” option which I used to shut down a bunch of unused services. I’m still confused as to why there were printer related services running when I specifically deselected all printer-related packages during the install. I don’t have a printer attached to the laptop and I don’t plan on getting one.
After spending about an hour fooling with this and that, I found a “Desktop Switcher” option. I thought to myself, “cool, maybe there’s a faster desktop than GNOME.” The only other option there was ‘TWM,’ so I clicked it.
It was then that I realized just how easy it is to break a Linux installation. I wasn’t running as root, I was running as a normal user. It dropped me to a blue background with no menus, no icons, nothing. After clicking a bunch of times, the only thing I could bring up was a terminal window. I promptly got back on my “real” desktop machine (running Windows 98) and found a #redhat IRC channel on irc.openprojects.org. Luckily, they told me how to switchback (‘switchdesk gnome’). Unfortunately, it didn’t work 100%. You see, at every login, I am still presented with an ugly “Welcome to XFree86” login screen (as opposed to the default RedHat one I originally had). I tinkered with /etc/inittab for another hour and finally gave up when nothing seemed to work (even changing it to gdm, but as I mentioned, I’m no expert).
Since the whole mess was slow anyway, I decided to try my extra computer (which had CRUX 0.9.4 installed, but that I never used since I couldn’t get much done on it). This computer is a 500mhz Celeron with 128MB of RAM, a 13GB hard drive, and a 16MB Riva TNT (no sound card).
This installation went much faster (about half an hour), and I chose to install WindowMaker and KDE (in addition to the GNOME default). I figured if GNOME was still too slow, I could try something else.
Again, the installation was straightforward and I had no problems. I got to GNOME and low-and-behold, it’s still slower than molasses. I seriously don’t know how anyone can use a system such as this. Every window takes eons to load, and that’s just the regular file manager. Apps take even longer.
Wait, I take that back. I loaded AbiWord and it loaded right away. However, inside the application, the word wrap didn’t work correctly, and wrapped somewhere around 1.5 screens wide, and I couldn’t find an option that changed that. The browsers were slow, preference panels still ignored my settings (no animations), and even though I installed Galeon and Mozilla, the ‘default’ browser is always lynx.
So I fired up the desktop switching utility again (this time I was sure to stay away from TWM). I first tried KDE, which was slower than GNOME (if that’s possible). The windows are sluggish, startup times are horrid, and frankly, the default fonts are pretty ugly. The ugly part doesn’t bother me much, in all honesty, I just want to get some work done. My main tasks include coding in PHP, testing in a web browser, checking email, and chatting on IRC. These tasks should not bring a 500mhz computer to its knees!
Another major usability problem is the menu system. System Tools, System Settings, Preferences, and Server Settings are all duplicated under the ‘Extras’ menu. Why can’t they be categorized with the rest of the applications? Furthermore, why can’t I easily recategorize them to suit my needs? In Windows, it’s as simple as dragging the menu items around.
So, after a failed KDE trial, I decided to try WindowMaker. I had a little bit of an introduction to WindowMaker in my previously mentioned CRUX install. In CRUX, none of the menu items worked, so it was pretty pointless. I figured RedHat would get it right. When WindowMaker started, it looked exactly like the CRUX install. The menus were full of applications that simply didn’t work (not found errors). I don’t understand why someone would include a bunch of programs in the menus when the programs themselves aren’t even installed.
However, I did look around and I did find programs I was sure were installed. For instance, The GIMP. It worked in GNOME so I knew it was installed… Still got the error, though. The only menu item that worked in WindowMaker was VIM, but why do I need WindowMaker to run a text application? Back to GNOME (this time using ‘switchdesk gnome’ since there was no menu option for it).
Uh-oh, after switching from GNOME to KDE to TWM and back to GNOME again, all the desktop icons disappeared. I still have the menu and I still have the panel, but no desktop icons whatsoever. No home directory, no “start here,” nothing.
Needless to say, I’m not impressed. Sure, the GNOME installation looked good. I like the interface, a lot. I just can’t stand how slow it is.
Although the package management system was much better than the last time I used RedHat (6.1), it’s still not as convenient as going to the author’s web site, downloading a file, and double-clicking it to invoke the installer. Plus, the removal of packages leaves a big dirty mess in my home directory.
I think it’s important for an operating system that’s touted as “user friendly” to be pretty resistant to permanent breakage, especially for a normal user. If a utility has the potential to break or change the entire system (such as my switch to TWM), it either shouldn’t be presented as an option, or there should be a warning message. RedHat shouldn’t assume that everyone who installs their operating system is familiar with Linux, and every change should have an easy fix, should something break.
Finally, was there anything I liked about it? First of all, I chose to install Apache, bind, MySQL, and mod-php. Logged in as root, I was able to find the “services” utility and start MySQL and Apache at boot up (as a service). I was able to configure Apache using the graphical tool – much easier than on Windows, I must say. Galeon wasn’t bad, but why must it require the Mozilla package to run? I realize it’s based on Gecko, but what’s the point of having two complete browsers installed when I only need one?
In conclusion, my experience wasn’t a positive one, and I’m afraid I will be using Windows 98 for quite a while. I really dislike Microsoft and Windows in general, I must admit that it at least lets me get my work done in a timely fashion. I do realize that my two systems aren’t the latest-and-greatest, but for my purposes, they should be sufficient. Unfortunately, I only see the situation getting worse. The major Linux distributions keep getting bigger and bigger, more and more bloated, and ultimately, slower.
I have seen this “super slowness” happen to several users including myself. It would take over a minute to open an application such as basic as a konqueror window. The fix turned out to be down-ing a configured network interface which is not connected to a network (/sbin/ifconfig eth0 down). After that the system worked fine.
Celeron 400 isnt gonna be the best chip to run linux on. its not bad but the lack cpu cache is low, but more importantly did you check to make sure it has the proper drivers for the mb’s chipset in the kernel, either loaded by modules or support compliled in?
I have the same experience with other Linux (Lycoris).
Ok. I agree that Celeron is not the fastest cpu on the earth but… come on!! It should be fast enough to run a GUI!!. I have a PII300 with 128 mb of ram and other OSes GUIs run a lot faster than the Linux one… I think there is no excuse for that slowness. And ok, do not expect from Joe user to recompile (what’s that?) the kernel (what’s that??). So, please, RedHat should stop calling its distro a “Desktop distro”…
Tobe
Two words:
Try BeOS
The celeron is a hamstrung chip to begin with
I suspect you’d have equal difficulties with any of the new offerings (w2k wxp) from Microsoft.
My personal preference these days is Mandrake. They really seem to make the extra effort to putting out something with all the new-user areas covered.
I’m sorry you had bad luck with your try. AFterstep was a good choice for your hardware tho.
Oh my.. no offense to OSnews but this article should be posted in a help forum and not condidered as any type of review of RH8, personal or not.
Summary: looks good but it runs slower than molasses.
Whatever the reason is.. It’s not because linux CANT run fast on a 500mhz. If this was intended to show a ‘non geek’ view of linux, so be it. But it is not informative in any way shape or form. And certainly has no bearing on the new RH release. It could have just as easily been any other OS/distro. The answer could be as simple as what Artem suggested. Or not. But in any case.. so sorry to hear about your problems =(
And yes I know this is your board and not mine.. Its just my opinion and I felt compeled to share it =)
I do not agree with all the griping. The hardware used for the article will not run a MODERN OS at a usable speed. It will run windows 95 or 98 fine or a Linux distro (yes, a GUI) from 3-4 years ago, but you will not be happy with anything newer. Why don’t you install Windows XP on these computers and then write a review. It won’t be positive either.
This is like writing a review of a new DVD player connected to a 20 year old TV and then complaining about the DVD player.
Stu
>not condidered as any type of review of RH8, personal or not.
This article is clearly marked as an *editorial*, not a review.
I found that KDE was signficantly faster when I switched to Gentoo. Presumably, running a custom compiled kernel, XFree86 and KDE were responsable for the speed up. Shortly after installing Gentoo, I upgraded to KDE 3.0.3, which might be even better. I suspect that the future will be even brigher – with gcc 3+ and glibc 2.3, support for C++ code (such as KDE) should be even better.
I did find KDE to be a sluggish (but nothing as show as you were observing). Occasionaly, I crash Konqueror & find the GUI really slowing down after that (the mouse becomes jerky), But a log out/log in seems to fix it. (Thank goodness the KDED desktop remembers its state. When Windows XP makes me reboot (which seems to be about every week lately, MS has been relasing a lot of patches), I have to restart every app manually.
Gentoo is not a distro that I would recomend to ‘the public’, but it has beem a fantastic learning tool for me. I can only hope that the Gentoo approach (or perhaps to be fair – the FreeBSD approach) of providing packages that you compile (rather than binaries you install) will become more user friendly. I should note that installing Gentoo has improved quite significantly in the last couple of months – the default kernel options needed very little hand tuning. The compiling takes a while, but the resulting software does seem faster & more stable to me.
Still, Gentoo is not a reasonable alternative for many users. However, it does seem to give a good taste of the future – and the future has better perforamnce 🙂
> Why don’t you install Windows XP on these computers
I have most of my OSes on a dual Celeron 533, and XP is fastest than all (except maybe BeOS on most cases, but not all).
I installed Mandrake 9.0 yesterday. It is as slow as the other of my Linuxes under KDE on that specific, and it is even now compiled with GCC 3.2. I don’t know why. WinXP works just fine on that machine. And I have 4 more Linuxes there, and they are all slower than XP. And BeOS of course.
First of all, I’ve gotten Win2k running on a P233 w/128MB RAM. No, you’re obviously not going to be playing Unreal Tournament 2003 on a box like that, but it’s still workable. I can’t imagine that being worse than a Celeron 400.
As for the other probs, I’m just ready to say fsck it with these ‘pre-canned’ distros and build the thing on my own, using a minimal setup from Gentoo, Debian, or FreeBSD. That way, when things break, perhaps I’ll have a handle on how to fix them.
I’ve had the misfortune to work (briefly) with a couple Celeron 400’s and 466’s — these things are slow running Win95…. I’d be surprised if KDE3, Gnome2, Win2k, or WinXP were usable on this hardware. A P2-400 or P3-500 should be fine, but not an old Celeron.
–Raging Dragon
>Try BeOS…
In fact I am a BeOS user since BeOS 4… and I still love it. I keep it in my PC as my main PC-OS at home. I’m now a switcher. Anyway, I also have an XP on the same machine and runs faster than linux. In fact, it runs pretty well.
Tobe
even if it’s a review, the person in question should have figured that a slowness like that is anything but normal. So he should either have tried to fix whatever is wrong, or note that this is a, to my knowledge rare occurance that Gnome is slowed down like this.
s/review/editorial
but, the fact is that I am typing this from a VIA Eden 800Mhz with a C3 cpu running Suse Linux 8.0.
KDE is not super fast, but neither is it incredibly slow. I would say it performs as well as a 233Mhz Pentium running Windows 98.
So it is not his Celeron that is causing the slow down, I don’t buy that.
There has to be a bug in Red Hat somewhere.
PS.Remember to run Memory test before you install Linux, that way you won’t throw your weekend in the garbage can, because of a faulty 128mb sdr module.
Have a nice night
Michael
But at least we have Gentoo to fall back on since the old saying is true, “nothing really works as well as when you do it yourself,” it seems.
I have a Hitachi laptop with a Pentium chip running at 150mhz with 128megs of ram. The only OS that I can run on this is WinNT 4.0. Win2K runs okay, but still a little too slow. I have tried numerous Linux distros, but they are all painfully slow. So, please don’t give me that crap that no modern OS can run on this guy’s hardware. WinNT and Win2K would run fine. I suspect that the engineering departments at Redhat, etc are running high-end workstations and probably have no idea how their distribution would respond on lower-end hardware. Saying that, is there a published set of minimum hardware requirements for 8.0 and if so, does this guy’s stuff meet those requirements?
Yeah, the Celeron is an awful chip. And yes, 64 megs of RAM is crap. But, there is no reason for it to run that slow. FIVE MINUTES TO OPEN UP A FILE!? That’s unacceptable. There must be something wrong with his computer (bad memory) or the kernel (maybe something can be fixed to make it go faster). I don’t think a normal computer with the same specs would perform like this.
The reason Linux is so slow after the first reboot is because Red Hat Linux indexes all files after the first reboot.
Execute “top” to display the most CPU-intensive tasks on your system.
First, Celeron 400 is a very outdated hadware to try a very recent version of RedHat. Try to run on a Athlon > 1.2 GHz or P4 > 1.4 GHz.
Second, win9x is only a very outdated toy O.S. It is singleuser and a toy O.S. He is comparing a 1998 operating system with 2002 o.s. Any fair comparation with a modern linux must be taken with WinXP.
Third, even gcc 3.2 is not a very good compiler in terms of optimization. When I compile my programs with Intel C++ compiler on linux they run 30-50% faster. I think that even M$ Visual C++ (Intel C++ is better than it) can gain 20-30% of speed with the same source code.
i think if you want a good performing unix distro…get FreeBSD and install IceWM on your machine…you’ll be impressed…or if you really want performance, put Blackbox or Ion on there instead.
just my 2 cents
redhat’s not fast in its default config…that’s true…but that’s not their focus…they’re trying to create a nice friendly business ready desktop for modern hardware
Sorry, but if you compare the same versions of KDE and Gnome running in Linux and FreeBSD you feel that running them on linux is faster. FreeBSD is very stable and fast for servers but is is not as optimized as linux for desktop. I use both on the same machine and can say this.
There is no real reasons to think the contrary because FreeBSD use the same programs and compiled with the same compiler (gcc) used by linux.
I have Gentoo 1.2 running kde 3.0.3 on Celleron 400/256MB ram as workstation at the office , it is quite useable (the whole system seems more responsive than w2k running on the same machine).
Two words:
Try BeOS
Two words for you: It’s Dead.
I run linux on my 400 mhz pentium2 laptop. It is just as snappy as windows, maybe even faster. Its not the new version of red hat, but it shouldn’t make that large of a difference.
WHERE?
as well as some much newer hardware. I have a laptop (IBM Thinkpad) with a 266 mhz PII and 288 megs of RAM (maxed out – it has 32 soldered on the motherboard) as well as an old 4 gig hardware. I also own a much newer dual Athlon 1.533 ghz machine with SCSI I/O, 512 megs DDR RAM, and a Radion 8500 128 mgs RAM. I run both Win XP and some flavor of Unix on my workstation (recently Red Hat 8.0, but also have run Mandrake, SuSE, FreeBSD, etc) and usually just Linux on the laptop.
There – so thats my hardware. In my opinion Linux tends to be more RAM hungry then Windows *when used as a desktop.* You can use 32 megs of RAM with Linux when used only as a DNS, or a mail server, or a router and what have you. But once you load Gnome or KDE you need *at least 192 megs* in my experiences. 128 is bare-min and 64 will just be an excersize in pain. I’ve installed recent distro’s on old hardware just for fun like Pentium 100s with 48 megs of RAM (at the most) to Pentium 75s with 16 megs of RAM. All perform fine for low-impact servers, but all were sloooow as desktops.
Given enough RAM my laptop didn’t feel all that slow. Gnome was mostly fast for me except for Nautilus which is a resource pig. Still, I don’t manipulate my files all that often so I can live with that. Launching most applications was fine with the exception of Open Office and Mozilla, everything else was fine. KDE starts slow on just about everything – even my workstation, and Konquerer can be as bad as Nautilus. But given my amount of RAM it ran fine. With Linux’s less then wonderful VM machines with 128 or under can see performance drops fairly quick. A fine-tuned FreeBSD install will actually be fine (FreeBSD by default has some very conservative settings, you gotta tune the hell out of it to make it into a decent desktop) but not blazingly fast.
On my much newer SMP workstation everything is fast. Sounds funny and obvious, but its true – even Nautilus is *snappy* and Mozilla loads faster in Linux then in Windows. Even Open Office isn’t all that bad, taking roughly the same length of time to load in Linux as in Windows.
So, in my opinion, if you loaded up said PC with two or three times the RAM and made sure DMA is turned on for your harddisks, I can promise you Linux will be faster. But with 64 megs of RAM – Celeron or not – its gonna be dog slow. This may improve rather drasticly with the release of Linux 2.6/3.0 with all of its impressive improvements (new/fast VM, I/O revamping, new scheduler, far faster threading implementation, etc) Although not meant for a desktop O.S. try FreeBSD – once its tuned it can kick some ass. 🙂 And I love the ports collection. If you decide to give this a shot feel free to email me for some tuning hints. Laterz folks!
When I used to use RedHat 7.3 it was terribly slow on my K6/2 500 with 128 megaram., then I updated my bois, and things speeded up. Not as fast as Windows but it was now usable. Home icon now loading in under 3 seconds… But then I upgraded to RedHat 8 and things have been fine. Home icon comes up just as fast as Windows… Mozilla not as fast as Internet Explorer but it’s just as fast as it’s going to be on any other OS I have tried it on. All other programs seem to load right when I click them. Even Open Office loads just as fast as Microsoft Office. So I don’t know …
My issues is they are some bugs still I have noticed, things have changed such as my DHCP old settings need to be reconfigured, can’t add things to the ‘start menu’ is a big one, and no RPM package system for non-RedHat RPM’s that are installed. You install something like RealPlayer you are stuck, it won’t be on your menu, and you won’t be able to uninstall it unless from a terminal using the rpm command.
I have 2 computers, one is an Athlon 1.3Ghz and RH8 w/Gnome runs really fast, opening the ‘home’ folder takes less than a second, and the other computer is a Celeron 500Mhz and it’s not as fast as the Athlon by it’s not slow either, opening the same ‘home’ folder takes no more than 2 seconds. You probably had some incompatibility with some type of hardware that you have in your computers.
Linux will always perform less responsive in Desktop Environments compared to Windows9x/ME (or 2000/XP for that matter) on low end systems, simply because the base for all GUI stuff on Linux is XFree86, which doesn’t take advantage of your graphic card the same way as other OS’s does, despite DRI and such.
BeOS and Windows uses simple framebuffer techniques, XFree86 doesn’t. Until xdirectfb or any similar project becomes big enough to support most cards and features out there to become standard, the linux desktop will always be for die-hard fans who can stand a little slow down in return for everything else Linux offers.
Try running your Gnome desktop on a newer Matrox card (which is fully supported) with XDirectFB instead of XFree, and in addition to that use neatly configured reiserfs and well configured kernel, then Linux all of a sudden beat Windows pretty much on all bases.
Think about it…
I use BeOS and it isn’t dead.
http://www.openbeos.org/
http://www.yellowtab.com/
http://www.blueeyedos.com/
http://www.bebits.com/
//FreeBSD is very stable and fast for servers but is is not as optimized as linux for desktop.\
The ports are made much diferently from source.
Software applications are much more integrated with the FreeBSD kernel than in Linux, starting with XFree, QT and KDE ports… that is just my opinion.
… have to go through this every time a major release gets out?
It’s always the same: some people swear by it, and others just swear
Some releases work better than others on a certain set of machines. That’s got little – if at all – to do with QA or the overall quality of an operating system, it’s just life.
monty
Thanks for the comments.
“Saying that, is there a published set of minimum hardware requirements for 8.0 and if so, does this guy’s stuff meet those requirements?”
The laptop doesn’t meet the memory requirement (128MB) for “graphical” mode. The desktop does.
Believe me, I’d love to try Gentoo. I’m not afraid of mucking around in things like that, but unfortunately, I’m on dialup, so it’s not really an option. I may take my laptop over to a friends house with a cable modem and give that a try.
Regarding Linux vs. a “modern” OS (people said I should compare it to XP) – what does XP have that Windows 98 doesn’t have? Themes support? I don’t want or need that, and I’d turn off the themes service anyway. An HTML interface into everything? What’s the point? It’s slower and offers no productivity gains. If I want to see the file size, I’ll right click/properties, no need to custom generate and then process a custom HTML page for every explorer window.
Yes, I focused on the fact that it was slow. But I also mentioned some bugs (disappearing desktop icons, switchdesk doesn’t change the graphical login screen back) and usability factors (cluttered menus, lists of applications that aren’t installed in the menu of WM, extremely large icons [maybe I didn’t mention this one, but on the 800×600 laptop screen they were a joke!]).
Regarding BeOS, I *did* use BeOS for quite a while. I loved it… it booted in 8 seconds on my Celeron 450a (oc’d 300) and performed perfectly. I could probably get away with installing it and using it on the desktop machine, since it’s got fairly standard “old” parts in it (which are probably all supported by BeOS), but I doubt it would work correctly on my laptop. I’ll give it a try.
As for slowness being a hardware conflict – what are the chances of having hardware conflicts on both machines that produce the exact same results? Probably slim-to-none.
Believe me, I really, really, REALLY want to get away from MS. I don’t want XP – people say it’s faster, but if indeed it was faster, why are the system requirements higher than the 98 machine? It’s only faster if you throw exponentially faster hardware at it.
Ah well, thanks again for the comments.
As previously mentioned, X problems like that usually have to do with networking issues. Disable/check your interfaces, and most importantly your hostname->ip resolution. so like if you called your system “blahblah”, make sure you can ping blahblah and have it work. Otherwise everything will run dog slow.
> I don’t want XP – people say it’s faster, but if indeed it was faster, why are the system requirements higher than the 98 machine? It’s only faster if you throw exponentially faster hardware at it.
*Yes and No*.
Yes, it requires more memory and CPU because XP does way more things internally than Win9x does. XP is not based on Win9x, it has a different design.
On the other hand, XP has support for real multitasking in it, which means that WinAMP won’t stop playing the mp3s if you loading something or you are playing a game. Overall, XP is more responsive as well. The difference is that even if you throw a lot of memory and CPU on Win98, it will never be truly responsive as XP would be on the same machine. Win9x is based on DOS, with all the bag of worms that carries. WinXP is based on NT, which was created from scratch in the last decade. A different kettle of fish.
Also, XP is way more stable than Win9x. I would normally crash my Win98SE 2-3 times a week. Since I moved to XP last March, I haven’t seen a _single_ crash.
I use BeOS and it isn’t dead
Funny, none of your links point to BeOS 🙂
So it looks like it is dead…
-fooks
I have never used a celeron but I am running a pentium 233 with 64Mb of RAM on my RedHat 8.0 and 5 minutes to load an app there is obviously something wrong with your system.
I have tons of stuff loaded on virtual desktops
http://home.bak.rr.com/uproot/screenshots.html
and my system is still useable, granted I stay away from key apps like open office, evolution and mozilla (mozilla took me 18 seconds to load)
Instead of evolution I use sylpheed, instead of mozilla I use opera. I know office is bloated so I dont even install it. This machine is a duel boot with office XP installed and its no speed champion either.
This opnionated person reminds me when we all first got 95 and ppl were asking me where to click thier “internet”.
“The only menu item that worked in WindowMaker was VIM”
This tends to happen when you dont install something. I am not going to flame here but XP has a 64meg minumum (128 recommended) for RAM and that was released a year ago, RedHat came out Monday..Its time to buy a new system if you plan on posting reviews for the world to read.
As for slowness being a hardware conflict – what are the chances of having hardware conflicts on both machines that produce the exact same results? Probably slim-to-none.
Looks like you’re just darn unlucky. I’ve installed RedHat 8.0 on a Athlon 600 and it is very usable. Those figures you quote (5 minutes to start an app) are just mindblowing. For the record, Open Office starts in about 30 seconds (from a clean startup) here. That would mean your computer is about 10x slower. I don’t think so. It definitely smells like something is just misconfigured on your system. Try checking with TOP what’s going on when you’re loading up the application. Also, check if the system has unmasked the IDE IRQ, this helps a lot, especially on crappy Celeron hardware (check: hdparm /dev/hda, unmasking: hdparm -u1 /dev/hda)
-fooks
I’ve seen win2k on a p200 mmx with 128 ram, it ran impressively well…
I have also used linux on that same exactly system but with kde2.2 (as far as I can tell, there’s almost no speed difference between 2.2 and 3 that I can see at all). It ran pretty well too. I can’t really even make a comparison between win2k and kde on this system, neither one was super fast, but both were fast and responsive enough that I could use the system and enjoy it, I was able to use Mozilla in Linux on this system, and even that was fast (enough) for me to use without complaint. It was Debian, so it wasn’t one of those build absolutely everything yourself dists (compiling kde2/3 takes sooooo many hours on my dual p3 800 box, with a gig of ram, I wouldn’t wanna try it on a p200) so it everything wasn’t totally tweaked out and compiled for that exact system.
I think Richard might be on to something, I really think it could be an issue with X unsuccessfully resolving hostnames or at least some sorta networking issue with X.
But maybe redhat just isn’t the right way to go for a desktop, didn’t Bob Young say linux wasn’t for the desktop? That doesn’t sound too encouraging to me in regards to using their linux product on a desktop.
XFree86 either needs to die or at least die as we know it.
🙂
I have red hat 7 installed on a Pentium 233 with 64mb RAM, it runs pretty fast w/KDE,Gnome, and evolution, considering how old it is. It used to have win95 on it(before my conversion) and it ran about the same speed.
I saw a couple of posts on this topic where people were saying a celeron would not run Windows 2000 or RH Linux.
My brother has a Celeron 333 with 256M PC66 RAM running WindowsXP and SuSE 8.0. It runs fantastic for all applications. Close enough to my Dell with Pentium III 750 that I don’t notice a difference. The processor is likely not the issue. I’d guess that 64M of RAM is being used by processes starting up.
I have found the same bug as what Brian found in the editorial and as a basic user of linux I was unable to establish what was causing the the extreme slowness. I did see indications that it was caused by software. The reason I say this is because the windows can be moved around normal enough but the contents/widgets in the windows don’t update. This is extremely frustrating because I use SuSe 8.0 on this same laptop and does not have any of these troubles. Needless to say this was quite a bit of a let down. I can see however see myself liking Redhat 8, IF this big problem is fixed.
What I am running…
Dell Insporon 8100
Pentium 3-M 1.13ghz
32mb GForce2go
30gb Hard-drive
i know that on my laptop, if APM or APCI is running incorrectly, sometimes it’ll slow down the CPU to 50% power or something and things will run extremely slow. but a celeron 500 should run things pretty well.
I had really awful experiences with XP Home edition on my laptop (XP Home shipped on the laptop, it’s not as if I was trying to install it myself!). I resolved them by installing Linux.
So if I wrote up an “editorial” about how horrible XP Home is, would that be worthy of posting on OSNews? Or can we only expect to see “Linux sucks because of the isolated experiences of one user who didn’t know what he was doing” editorials here?
The problems I had with the pre-installed version of XP Home on this laptop were almost certainly not the fault of XP itself. Or maybe they were, I honestly don’t know. I just know that for the few days I played around with Home, I had an awful time of it — to the point that I ended up taking the thing in for service. I was told by the techs that there was nothing wrong with the machine, maybe it was just a bad install. They offered to restore the software to factory defaults and see if that cleared up the issues. I deferred and installed Linux instead. Problem solved, and I’d bought the thing with Linux in mind anyway.
So, what about it, Eugenia? If I detail my horrible experiences with XP Home, is that OSNewsworthy content? Or would it only be newsworthy if I was “editorializing” about how awful Linux is?
> If I detail my horrible experiences with XP Home, is that OSNewsworthy content?
YES, it is. (It would also be posted as the above story was posted, as an editorial.)
But you better cut the sarcasm, because my bag is filled up with it, and I have LITTLE patience after one year running OSNews.
I want to start by saying that I am a fan of the idea “an OS for every puprose.” I’ve spent many frustrating years of being a linux desktop user, and I came to this realization: Linux will never be a desktop OS. I spent the first 40 comments reading about how the person who wrote this editorial should “fix” his problems, by various means (recompiling the kernel, disabling unused network ports). The fact of the matter is that he shouldn’t have to do any of this. I use linux as my home server, and it kicks butt in that capacity. I was so tired of having to compile linux into submission for it to do what I wanted. I went back to windows. However, it suffers from different yet pervasive problems as well. It’s a security nightmare, it’s constantly in the way and won’t let you get work done.
I finally bought an iBook last winter. I can’t say that I’ll ever use it to play games or be a server, but it’s a work horse. I use it for nearly everything. I turn it on, do what I want, put it to sleep until I need it again. Apple makes a superior product, period. One will pay a premium upfront to purchas an apple (and I don’t want to hear the Mhz argument, and the premium isn’t that bad). While I paid more than I would have to buy a wintel machine, i have reaped back what I spent in folds by not having to constantly engage in battle with my computer. I don’t spend hours “fixing” things that ought to work in the first place. OS X is awesome. I administer my server with my laptop, and I don’t worry about pissing X off. I use my windows box for the infrequent occasion I wish to play games.
Anyway, just had to vent. I’m sick of hearing people defend linux as a desktop os and then turn around and say, “in order for it to work you have to do x, then y, then z. Then you have to pray to Guyumba, the god of compiled kernels and windex your floor.”
Get a mac. You won’t regret it.
TROLL with a capital T R O L L:
for example, crap like:
“Once the system was booted, I was surprised to see that GNOME was so slow, it was useless. It took a full 5 minutes for Open Office Writer to load up. It took a minute for a window to show up when I double-clicked on the ‘home’ icon. I’m sorry, but there’s no way I can use a system like this, I can’t get any work done.”
Having installed and configured Redhat 8 on Cyrix/IBM 233Mhz’s without any issue, one can ony say that this person is a troll with the worst case of “I can’t get my facts correct”. Sure, if he said that it took ice ages to load up Nautilus on Gnome 1.4, I could agree with him. It was painfully slow, HOWEVER, having run GNOME 2.0.2, compiled with with GCC 2.96 and 3.2, I can tell you, there is a definate speed improvement.
As for his, “5 minutes for Open Office Writer to load up”, talk about BULLSHIT!
Also, tactically, I never says what his video card is? could this be the source of problems? another crappy 810chipset with built in video and memory sharing.
Again, like the other critter, he did not even attempt to goto a newsgroup or any other forum, where by, I, or many other Linux users could have help him.
Conclusion, he is Yet Another Troll (YAT). This type of review is something you would see out of one of the local magazines written by Windows XP want-a-bee’s who don’t have the slightest clue on how to use a computer.
Funny how people who do have problems run shitty Celeron PC’s with either integrated video chipsets OR worse still, a GeForce card.
As for peoples comments regarding the Celeron processor, there is nothing wrong with them. Throw 128MB at it, have a Matrox G450 or G550, a 7200rpm hard disk, and you’ll have a nice little speed demon.
What video card do you have? is it supported via DRI? is it supported via DirectFB?
I actually got my hands on one of the new ones for the first time today, running Jaguar (OS 10.2). It was, no question, the sexiest coolest computer I have ever sat in front of. The screen blew me away, everything jumped out at me. Every icon was where it “felt” it should be, and did what it suggested.
If I didn’t work for a major Intel OEM, I’d buy one and use it for my primary work/home PC.
As previously mentioned, X problems like that usually have to do with networking issues. Disable/check your interfaces, and most importantly your hostname->ip resolution. So like if you called your system “blahblah”, make sure you can ping blahblah and have it work. Otherwise everything will run dog slow. If you can’t ping by hostname, add an entry to /etc/hosts with your hostname and IP. You’ll see the format.
The pings return around 0.080ms consistently, so the networking seems to be okay. I can access this machine from my Windows 98 desktop. They are connected together using a cable/dsl/router from linksys.
I think the problem with the laptop is that it just doesn’t have enough memory. Using the System Monitor shows that even before launching OpenOffice Writer, the memory is full and swap space is already being used. So likely that is simply swapping everything in and out of memory. What a nightmare.
The desktop fares better, but I didn’t install OpenOffice this time, I installed KOffice. KWord takes 20 seconds to load, not too bad. I have an extra 128MB stick laying around here somewhere, I’ll install it shortly.
In KDE, how the hell do I make the ‘taskbar’ bigger? It can only fit 4 applications, and it takes up only about 25% of the bottom bar, when I want it to take 75%.
“I do not agree with all the griping. The hardware used for the article will not run a MODERN OS at a usable speed.”
I run QNX 6.2, OS/2 Warp Server for e-Business and Be on my ThinkPad. It has a Celeron 266 and KICKS ASS!
Linux’s visual slowness has nothing to do with the processor. Generally speaking, it has to do with the video card. I went from a Gigabyte TNT2A 128Bit AGP 32SDR to a Matrox G550 32DDR and found there was a major speed improvement, especially with the DVD playback and general smoothness.
Conclusion, Matrox give the best overall eXPerience to UNIX/Linux users. I don’t work for them, however, I will promote them as they are a good video card to be used with any UNIX like operating system.
Matthew, check your mail.
I feel your pain, but if you want to use Linux on your machine, you have to be a little more persistent. Linux has a lot less support from manufacturers, and most testing is done by end users. Nobody can afford to sell a PC that doesn’t work well with Windows, but hardly any manufacturer properly tests their PCs with Linux (this would be especially necessary for notebooks). In addition, all Linux distributors combined are very small fry compared to MS (that is, until IBM releases their own distro ;-). These are the unfortunate effects of the monopoly Microsoft holds, and since the world’s governments have been unwilling to tackle the juggernaut, we are pretty much on our own.
The consequence is that you either have to buy one of those rare PCs that come with a preinstalled and properly configured Linux distro (the Microtel $200 Lindows PCs sold at Wal Mart seem to qualify, although you *have* to disable “running as root” before using them), or you have to tweak your self-installed system until it works properly. Depending on your machine and distribution, this can take the better part of a day, or a couple of weeks, or you may find that Linux simply doesn’t work good enough or at all (this can be the case with some exotic notebook chipsets). Moving my main machine from NT to Debian took me about two weeks (I include in this the amount of time it took me to find good applications for everyday work).
I did have previous experiences with other distributions, and I first tried Linux when I got one of my first Pentiums. That must have been around 1996 or so. It did work well, but it required a lot of RAM, and applications generally started slower than under Windows (95 at the time), but ran faster and multitasked better. The lack of apps, ugliness of X-Windows and complexity of configuration turned me away back then, but we’ve come a long way. I say this to make clear that Linux was designed for PCs that we now consider very low end, so when properly configured, it *will* run with them without problems.
I have always been lucky with Linux in that none of the systems I have ever configured with it was so slow to be unusable, but I did have major problems with Debian until I found out about hdparm. After playing around with those fancy DMA and IRQ settings I don’t want or care to understand, I finally solved an issue that bugged me for months: the mouse pointer was always jumping around during heavy harddisk access. Turns out the Debian default config didn’t take this problem into account.
Given the numbers you cite, I would expect a major misconfiguration to be lurking somewhere. Besides what has already been said (hdparm, network) many other causes can be responsible — bad video drivers, bad input drivers (an old version of my Wacom tablet X11 driver made my entire system extremely slow), etc. etc. Also be sure to turn font anti-aliasing off, as it is still too slow to use on low end machines. Under KDE this is a menu option in the control center. Have you tried running X apps under twm by starting them from the console window — if so, was there a speed difference?
You should be able to run everything but OpenOffice in decent speed on your machine, and OO should not take longer than a minute to start up. OO is and has always been extremely bloated and takes an unacceptable time to startup even on a multi-gigahertz machine, since all parts of the office suite are loaded together, but when it’s started it should run reasonably fast even on low end machines with enough RAM. Still, I’m looking forward to the alternatives, the ever improving KOffice, and the soon to be released as OSS (according to OsNews) gobeProductive suite. The sad fact is that Crossover Office under WINE starts faster than OpenOffice natively. Forget about AbiWord, I doubt it will ever be good as anything but a Word file viewer.
It would be dishonest to say that Linux+X11 is faster than Windows, that’s simply not true. My own experience is that the DOS-based Windows versions (which I would not dare to use for anything but games) are faster than Linux *and* the NT/2K/XP versions of Windows, whereas Linux and XP, when properly configured, are pretty much the same speed, although certain OS-level tasks (anti-aliasing, window resizing etc.) are noticably slower under Linux. The kernel itself is great and has lots of features that Windows doesn’t have.
Many of the Linux desktop problems can be blamed on X11/XFree86, whis is a horrible jungle of different modules that interact badly with each other and have to be configured using different files. Distributors nowadays spend a lot of their time fixing X11’s countless deficiencies, through various hacks and self-made front-ends. Ultimately, I am hoping for a replacement (as Windows+VNC etc. shows, direct rendering and network access work well together and a client/server architecture is unnecessary for everyday use). What this takes would probably be a very dedicated team of individuals working on creating a basic, nice desktop system (i.e. porting existing apps) using something like DirectFB or Berlin as its foundation. I would be one of the first to jump ship. As I have said before, any GUI that requires the user to go through a long and highly complex “de-uglification HOWTO” after its default install is fundamentally broken.
Incorrect. I am running a PIII 550 w/ 768MB RAM, 60gig harddisk, Matrox G550 and it runs Redhat 7.3 and 8.0 without any of the problems whindgers on this forum crap on about.
1) Remove the crappy Nvidia/810/S3 based card, and replace with Matrox G550
2) Throw into the machine as much memory as you can afford
3) Upgrade the hard disk to a 7200rpm
4) Enable 32bit mode + read ahead + numerous other tweaks under /etc/sysconfig/harddisks
This applies to any machine out there. Whether is a multi-gigahertz or a Cyrix CPU. You too can get good performance if you follow my advice.
What video card do you have? is it supported via DRI? is it supported via DirectFB?
DRI? DirectFB? Don’t know. The laptop has a 2.5MB video card that supposedly has some 3d ability (I ran Jedi Knight part 1 on it at about 15 frames a second at 800×600). The desktop has a 16MB Riva TNT on it.
Regarding the “YAT” post… I don’t want to get in a fight, I just wrote my experiences. After having the exact same symptoms on both systems, I figured it was simply the fault of the OS, not my hardware. It doesn’t seem like a configuration problem or anything else. I don’t get any error messages, things seem to work, just very, very slowly. As I mentioned, I did visit an IRC channel to get help with the desktop switcher, wherein, I found YAB (yet another bug), as I mentioned.
I’m not trying to troll. I *hate* Windows and I want something else. I just don’t understand how these “desktop environments” need so much memory and processing power just to run a word processing program. I don’t give a damn how people think a “modern” operating system should be, but I don’t do any multi-media, I don’t do any sound or video editing. I don’t ever install Macromedia Flash or RealPlayer, and I never listen to MP3s. I certainly don’t play 3d games on these computers. All I want is a simple operating system that can run a syntax-highlighting text editor, an simple GUI FTP client, a small web browser (on Windows, I use Opera & the recently released Phoenix), and an email client. This “multi-tasking” should be no problem for any operating system released since Windows 95.
You can insult me and call me names all you want, but I wrote my experiences and my opinions truthfully. I have no reason to hate RedHat or Linux or anything else. Probably more than you, I want to go 100% Microsoft-free. But I need a way I can do it simply, easily, and with a reasonable amount of speed. What’s the point of going to another OS if my productivity goes way down?
Do the math. It takes about a minute for Windows 98 to load on these computers. If it crashes once a day, I lose whatever I was working on (not much, since I press ctrl-s after virtually every sentence) plus a minute of downtime due to the reboot, plus however long it takes to load up EditPlus, FileZilla, Opera, and MailWasher (say another minute).
In comparison to this new RH installation, I lose twice that on just the bootup. I lose 4-5x that loading KDE/GNOME after I boot up. I lose another 1x that loading up the applications (which take at least twice as long to load for the default ones, probably a bit faster if I was able to find, install, and configure a decently fast alternative to the email client or whatever).
> Why don’t you install Windows
> XP on these computers
I don’t know about Celerons, but believe it or not, my company has XP running on Pentium 166 machines. Well, with 256megs of ram. We have about about four of those. They are damn slow, and I couldn’t personally work on them, but we do have people doing productive work on them anyways. XP does very well in terms of speed.
I think the author’s hardware (64 megs of Ram?) is an invitation to trouble, but I agree that linux desktops should be faster than they are now. Linux companies should take this serious. Nothing turns a user off as fast as speed problems.
I still run redhat on an AMD 350 box. It isn’t a speed daemon, and xp isn’t a speed daemon on it either, but both are eminently useable.
Yes, I received the email. As I have said in there. If he said XYZ was buggy, sure, no problems. However, blatantly fibbing saying that it took OpenOffice Write 5 minutes to load is not just an over exaduration, but a load of BS. I certainly don’t paint my tale of wowes I have had with Windows 2000 and Windows XP, because quite frankly, its my own fault for not RTFM’ing.
typical user comment: “you dont know what your doing, go back to microsoft windos, we dont want you, slow? its fast for me on my dual p3-800, u need more ram, you should have bought the xyz module, did you irc or did you icq?”
this is comment #60, most people wont read it, but i dont care.
deadrat 8, like 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3, are all desktop-editions. i like the login screen, but i dont like anything else about it. having 150×80 trash can on the desktop is not fun to have. the “bluecurve” theme reminds me of the “active direct .net” desktop hype in windows. its only a theme, and a very poor one at that. its hard to use, not designed for anyone outside of deadrat-hq, and doesnt even have kernel 2.4.19, which was released *how long ago*…
deadrat 8.0, imho, is another distribution that is taking money away from truely innovative and focused distros, just like lindows, but with lindows its sucking money away from its director (well, i hope so! without a single release its not taking money from me!). mandrake 9.0 is also on my $hit list: whats the difference between 8.2 and 9.0? well, my laptop without a network cable plugged in doesnt take 15 minutes to figure out that there isnt a dhcp server? Oh wait, it comes with kde3, like 30 other distributionns made 4 months before it (hint: already behind the 8ball).
also, when will distros start to load non-critical services in the background and let the user use the desktop? example: i have, by default, sshd apache cupsd on my “default” startup, why do i have to wait for them to load before X loads and i can do stuff? And when will we see someone put some time and effort into making a hyper-startup like feature that is in windows eXPlodey that will bring startup times down from 2 minutes to 30 secods by saving the startup cache in a big md5’s file?
grr, zealots aside, when will we see some real progress, and not a new number and a new theme?
I just want to say a couple of things:
First, I think that a ‘non-geek’ view of OSes is always a relevant one. By all means, they also buy software, in fact, this frustrated user spent forty dollars just to try a new OS. I think this is important to note. If the systems he owns are sufficient to get his work done, I don’t understant why he has to upgrade them, anyway, he’s not a geek like some of us…
Secondly, as posted by some of you above, a Celeron 400 is still capable of doing small tasks, al least tasks not very graphic-intensive. But with a good Geforce, the impossible can be possible. My own experience: one of my machines, a P233 with 384Mb Ram and a Matrox G450 runs XP very nicely. Not with all the animations and menu shadows, of course, but I use it to work on Autocad, and I have no complaints. Some time ago, I tried an RH distro on it (can’t remember which one) and it worked ok too. Maybe our frustrated user has to do some hardware tweaking on his machine.
But, in the end, this could really be a typical first-time bad luck. Don’t give up, tho!
TROLL with a capital T R O L L:
Ok, now lets see what you have to say.
for example, crap like:
“Once the system was booted, I was surprised to see that GNOME was so slow, it was useless. It took a full 5 minutes for Open Office Writer to load up. It took a minute for a window to show up when I double-clicked on the ‘home’ icon. I’m sorry, but there’s no way I can use a system like this, I can’t get any work done.”
so he has a bad day with openoffice. so what? how many people have had bad days with winxp and you call them a “troll”?
Having installed and configured Redhat 8 on Cyrix/IBM 233Mhz’s without any issue
I have troubles installing deadrat on a p2-350. you must be telling the truth or lying your ass off. lets see what else you had to say…
, one can ony say that this person is a troll with the worst case of “I can’t get my facts correct”. Sure, if he said that it took ice ages to load up Nautilus on Gnome 1.4, I could agree with him.
But deadrat 8 (desktop edition) has gnome v2.0.2, does he have to install deadrat 7.3 (gnome 1.4) to know how to use 8.0? Or to give it a fair review of “it now takes 3 minutes to load, where it used to take 5 minutes!”
It was painfully slow, HOWEVER, having run GNOME 2.0.2, compiled with with GCC 2.96 and 3.2, I can tell you, there is a definate speed improvement.
In other words, he has to download the source code of everything and compile it for his system. Have you ever tried gentoo linux? It is a source-code based distribution. you have to compile everything for your system. no? well, maybe gentoo is what he needs?
As for his, “5 minutes for Open Office Writer to load up”, talk about BULLSHIT!
I’m sorry, but have you thought that it would take that long if the following conditions were true:
1) the distro is using 128megs of ram on boot
2) open office likes to have 20megs to itself
3) The user has a 64meg machine.
Please, can you repeat what you just said, i quite didnt hear it…
Also, tactically, I never says what his video card is? could this be the source of problems? another crappy 810chipset with built in video and memory sharing.
The programs too 5 minutes to load. he must be using cockroaches and not a pci bus, coz nothing takes that long to draw.
Again, like the other critter, he did not even attempt to goto a newsgroup or any other forum, where by, I, or many other Linux users could have help him.
Read the post again. He did ask for help, he got it, it didnt work, what is left to do? I know, lets reapply the service pack and reboot…
Conclusion, he is Yet Another Troll (YAT). This type of review is something you would see out of one of the local magazines written by Windows XP want-a-bee’s who don’t have the slightest clue on how to use a computer.
Lets see, he manages linux servers for a living. does he need to put down his job title for you to understand that me *may* know more than you?
Funny how people who do have problems run shitty Celeron PC’s with either integrated video chipsets OR worse still, a GeForce card.
They are computer users like the rest of us. if the user finds performance in a particular distro, and no performance in another,it must then be a user problem!
As for peoples comments regarding the Celeron processor, there is nothing wrong with them. Throw 128MB at it, have a Matrox G450 or G550, a 7200rpm hard disk, and you’ll have a nice little speed demon.
Please upgrade all hardware and dont use your old computer again, wait, isnt this m$ talking here?
Hi,
my website http://bezip.de ist running on a P200 and FreeBSD-STABLE. It’s fast and rock-solid. Last month I had over 320 GB of traffic and 70.000 visits …
Ciao,
Sebastian
I have a system running on 1.3GHz athlon w/ 768MB of ram -both win2k / XP snappy. I noticed a drop in performance. I had mandrake9 installed previously using resierfs w/ the notail option to optimize performance. KDE and Gnome apps were snappier. I’m not sure if ext3 is causing the performance drop – but it has been consistant in the past. Also, there aren’t many services running in the background. I’ll have to do some homework However, The comnfiguration options in the bluecurve desktop (mostly gnome apps) are much improved – network configuration, X resolution settings. It kind of reminds me of BeOS’s interface – but way sexier. Nonetheless this speed thing is a cosmetic issue – linux is really a console OS making a transition into a hybrid console/GUI OS – this is quite a feat and the progress is quite remarkable.
I have windows 2000 in a sony notebook with a k6 500 mhz. Win2000 is very fast, but all the linux distros i’ve tried are very slow slow slow. I have now mandrake 8.2 and it barely works. Funny that most linux zealots promote linux as being able to run perfectly on older hardware 😐
If the systems he owns are sufficient to get his work done, I don’t understant why he has to upgrade them, anyway, he’s not a geek like some of us…
Because I’m sick of Microsoft (they owe me $40 they charged my Asheron’s Call account *after* I cancelled my subscription, and they refuse to refund the money — long story). Because it does crash occasionally, even when doing relatively simple things. Because I was under the impression that “Linux” was “faster.” Because I don’t want to provide any support whatsoever (even indirectly, by purchasing Windows software) to a company that does business as Microsoft does business.
I don’t trust them, I’m in the middle of starting a business, and I wanted to put a more stable, trustworthy OS on my laptop. I threw it on the desktop “just because” – I wanted to see if it was RH Linux that was slow or just a bad install on the laptop.
Brian, I don’t know because I haven’t tried it, but 64 MB RAM, I would think, would probably slow down something like a 400 MHz Celeron. But, it seems like your other system should have been okay.
Others posted that they have seen this type of slowness, so perhaps there is something amiss with Red Hat on certain systems or components.
I was wondering, did you try the Personal Desktop install option? That’s what I did and even it takes 1.5 GB of disk space. On your laptop, was there enough space to have a good swap file? If you didn’t use that install option, you might have better luck with it – there is not the duplication of types of applications, etc. It’s pretty sleek and might work better if you are primarily interested in using text editors.
I’m sorry you’ve had such a bad experience – I know how disappointing it is to be excited about something and then have it turn out to be a big let down.
Well I’m currently running RH 8 final on an old HP Pavilian 6575z 466Mhz Celeron w/ 256MB SDRAM 50Gig HD, geForce 2 64MB video, and it runs just fine for me. The programs load at an acceptable speed, Galeon, OOo,it’s all good. I run strictly GNOME on this box, no KDE, WindowMaker, BlackBox etc. It’s really been a pleasure to use. I haven’t run into the problem this gentleman has run into, of course if I do I’ll definately be looking for the cure
Oh and Gentoo, I think I’ll wait till 1.4 is finalized…
Installed RH 8.0 on my homemade box and on a Microtel
SYSMAR 710 (bye bye, Lindoze). So far I’m liking it
OK. It’s even running pretty decently on the Microtel
box with the itty bitty C3 and 128 megs of RAM. There’s
definitely a little speed increase thanks to gcc 3.2
that I am enjoying.
My only gripe: dhclient is now the default DHCP client
but the version in the included binary RPM wouldn’t
see any DHCPOFFERs on AT&T Broadband. Not too big of
a deal. Researched it, found the needed patch
(change TTL value from 16 to 127), installed source
RPM, made change, compiled and installed, and voila,
my Microtel brand firewall and home LAN is back online.
Still… kind of a pain. It ate up some serious time
today. So thanks for that, Redhat.
But overall,
8.0 is treating me all right. So far… My $0.02.
I was wondering, did you try the Personal Desktop install option? That’s what I did and even it takes 1.5 GB of disk space. On your laptop, was there enough space to have a good swap file?
Yup, and it has a 4.3GB HD so I think it got the swap it needed… as I mentioned in my other post, I think the 64 is the reason for the slowness, considering X+GNOME took up all the memory, so every time I loaded anything else… swap, swap, swap. Still doesn’t explain the desktop system, though
If the software is too slow for your computers, return it to vendor and get your money back. RedHat, as well as many other distributions, are trying to make linux to be “all things to all people”, and the cost most of the time is system performance. If you want to run the latest greatest software, make sure your hardware is relatively new. Else stick with an older Linux, or Microsoft operating system version.
There is really no need for you to waste your time, and ours, for a problem that is that simple to solve.
Linux sucks . It’s that simple . Use BeOS .
” First, Celeron 400 is a very outdated hadware to try a very recent version of RedHat. Try to run on a Athlon > 1.2 GHz or P4 > 1.4 GHz. ”
The funny thing is, tons of Linux zealots keep saying they hate Microsoft because they keep pushing the hardware envelop, always in need of a better machine again and again (WinBload, etc). Well, as it look like, it’s something Microsoft doesn’t have a monopoly on … 🙂
Hi Brian!
I understand your frustration. To tell the truth your hw is quite oldie, and RH 8.0 simply isn’t directed to work on hw like that. But fortunatelly w/ some work you can leave M$ for ever
You find gnome/kde slow? Take a look at some ligtweigth wm like icewm or xfce. They know everything win98 gui knows and as fast as that is. You found nautilus slow? Try gentoo (yeah it’s a filemanager too not only a distro) or endevaour2. For mail u can use sylpheed. I personally develop php code to, i use glimmer for it as a code editor (it know syntax highliting, has tabs, and line numbering…everything i need to develop php code 
If you have trouble getting a properly configured kernel/system i guess you can find a more exerienced linux user somewhere near you (or thanks to ssh everywhere on the Earth 
who can help setyour comp up. Then the only difference between your current and future system will be that linux won’t freeze once a day. You don’t have to ctrl-s every second. You don’t have to use aa system which is no more supported by its creator. And you’ll find many open minded helpful people around you, w/ whom it’ll be a pleasure te explore your own system.
A word about gentoo: it might be a great distro, but i suggest you should yake a look at Lunar Linux too (lunar-linux.org). It’s source based too, has a very elegant and simple pure bash package handling system and a VERY ‘responsive’ and friendful developer community.
hope i helped,
bye, hirisov
If you purchased a boxed version of redhat 8, why did you not get support. perhaps there is something simple being over looked. Also there are all kind of user groups and forums that you can attend that may provide a solution, particularly if other people are having the same problem. I tested Redhat 8 on a 500 megahetz and ran fine.
The key thing in Linux is RAM. You’ll feel a big improvement when you get more RAM. On the other side, when linux hasn’t got enough RAM, it uses the swap partition as memory, and that is painfully slow, that’s called “swapping” and you’re gonna hate that bloody word.
So you have to avoid RAM greedy programs, like KDE, Gnome, Mozilla and Open Office. And if you were using them at the same time, you were shooting yourself in the head.
I’ve been using Linux this year on a 486 with 8 Mb of RAM, so it can be done. The key thing is to use different programs which are less pretty but do the same tasks.
Choose as a windowmanager something like twm, fluxbox, fvwm95 or something like that. You can search in google lightweight window manager, or you can ask on irc.. Maybe you’ll get scared the first time, you won’t find the windows taskbar and the start button, but play with it and find how it works. Windowmaker is very cool too. But you’re gonna need some time because they behave differently.
Choose a lightweight browser. Dillo is extremely light, you can use opera, or ask on irc.
And for an editor, just the same thing, google or irc for lightweight editor.
Open a console, and type “top”. You will see how many RAM is each program using. Type free and you will see how many RAM and swap are you using. If you are not using swap, that’s great.
So that’s it, the best computer you have, the biggest pieces of software you can use, but if you have a slow computer, you can take small software too to make it look fast. You can choose, unlike in windows.
Have fun.
Simply put, you’ll need an upgrade.
Consider this: Since slow and fast are basically two ralative terms they’re not going to be meaningful.
RH8 is released this year (ok, beginning of the week), 2001-2002. Pick any OS (with a form of GUI) that was released THIS year, now install these onto the same hardware that you just did. Now, how do they compare?
You see, you basically can’t take this year’s technology combine that with technology from 2 years ago, then complaine/blame/dislike this years techonology just because the combined result isn’t what you expected/’to your satisfaction’.
You have to take into consideration that it was your decision to combine these technologies from different point on the timeline.
And two years or so in computing age is quite a huge gap.
Would anyone agree with me here?
Or to put it bluntly, RH8 is too advanced (technologically) for your somewhat outdated hardware.
Geez, next time if you can’t download the isos for free, visit cheapbytes.com and get the CDs for a couble of bucks.
$40? That’s like 4 pizzas! Now what will you eat the next time you’re compiling a custom kernel?
I’m of the opinion that as linux matures, it is starting to show the problems Windows, and most any operating system does as it matures. Eventually, you reach the point where it is simply unusable on the previous generation of hardware. Increasingly there has been a trend towards trying to make faster code by increasing the code size. This optimal code for each task thing bogs down machines with less ram, or slower processors as to call each version requires some form of jump command to be issued in ASM, which is still the slowest opcode available. To me this trend of increased code size for speed optimizations is a bit non-sensical in an age of multiple instructions per clock cycle, but then to me the entire concept of swap files seems non-sensical and unneccesary. When a 256 meg machine runs all my software, and swaps to a 512-768 meg swap file, why do I need a swap file on a 1024 meg machine?
The answer is simple, you don’t, and I have proven it, as I have a DX4/100 with 64 megs of ram that runs WFW 3.11 and IE 4.0 faster than my 512 meg Athlon 1.33 runs XP. How you may ask? Simple, I used a third party RAM Disk that allows me to have ‘low level’ access to it in Win 3.1, and put the swap file (48 megs) on it. No disk chugging, ultra speedy. Wish I could get that working in Windows 98 or XP. Maybe a hardware card with 2-4 gigs of ram on it to use as swap space since these programmers are to lazy to implement memory handling efficiently?
But what do I expect when everything is written in C. Talk about a convoluted cryptic unneccesity. I would rather hand code 64k of Z80 assembly than spend five minutes looking at C.
Maybe I’m just too old school, but I increasingly feel a need to return to Basics. All the things we used to tout as linux’ big features, fast booting, efficient memory use, low system requirements are gone. BeOS in one fell swoop showed what a load of crap Linux and Windows startups were, with its ability to recognize and configure all of your hardware on the fly in under ten seconds. What does Red Hat or Mandrake take to start up these days? A minute? More? What the hell do these OS actually do on startup, sitting there chugging at the drive like crazy? At least M$ kind of fixed that with XP and to a lesser extent 2K, although to do it they switched hardware detection to it’s own process, meaning you can get halfway through loading a web page before hardware detection finished. It does NOT take more than ten seconds to start your kernel, enumerate the P&P bus, grab the device ID’s and load the appropriate drivers.
All that said, the bottom line is that Linux, in any form, has a LONG way to go before I’d consider giving it to the average user on a Workstation. The only distro that even came close in my estimation was Stormix’s version, and look at what happened to them for their effort (which for the time got an A+++ from me). They not only hid 90% of the linux internals from the user, but it came up fast and responded well even on junk hardware; but because they targeted the average user and removed all the control that is unneccessary for someone just sitting down to type a letter or browse the web, the Linux community as a whole ignored them resulting in their doom. You can feel this attitude in the response to Lindows. Lindows removes from the user the need to learn all the Unix legacy @#$% that makes linux a hackers dream and a users nightmare.
I am using RHL 8.0 and have used RHL-7.3 on PIII -866 / 256 MB RAM. Remote X-server in RHL – 8.0 takes ages to load.Even terminal too.Some times, like M$, it says its not responding.Where as i never had this problem on system it self or remote access in RHL 7.3. These guys definitely are bloating the OS like M$ than fine tuning it. I dont know whethere these software companies are in tie up with hardware companies. They just make us to buy to newest hardware to run the latest software.SAD 🙁
Ok…let’s talk about old hardware and new OS.
Here I have my Toshiba 300CDS and RH8 installed.
300CDS has a Pentium 166 (oh yes, first generation pentium), 2GB harddrive (just enough to install the basic OS with X and Gnome), 80 MB RAM (16 MB built-in, then 64MB upgrade).
I’m using it as a gateway (IPTables masquerade) and DNS Server (BIND), and Sendmail server.
At the console typed startx, time to load X and Gnome until no harddisk activity is 1 minute 22 seconds…and that’s on a P166 with services running in the backgound…
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All the things we used to tout as linux’ big features, fast booting, efficient memory use, low system requirements are gone.
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Linux is the kernel, damn it! Fast booting, efficient memory use, low system requirements are still true.
Those old P-166’s can be surprisingly quick compared to a number of machines in the 300-500mhz range when it comes down to doing routine tasks, like starting the OS or loading a program. For some reason the BIOS responds quicker, drive access seems less frequent, etc. Win 95 on a P166 with a mere 32 megs of ram will quite often load IE, Office or other common office needs quicker than say a K6/2-450 with 128 megs of ram on Win98se. It may not calculate a spreadsheet as quickly or run databases as fast, but for routine use it does indeed outrun the ‘more advanced’ machine. Does it make sense? No. Does it happen, Yes.
It often makes me wonder if there isn’t some sort of major flaw in the bus of the 300-500 mhz class machines, as the K6/2’s, PII’s and Celeries in these speeds all seem to lag in this one area.
http://www.redhat.com/software/linux/technical/
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Terry on 10-06 03:05:37 said
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Linux is the kernel, damn it! Fast booting, efficient memory use, low system requirements are still true.
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Yes, but a Kernel by itself is useless. Today people cannot think of linux by itself, but the X-Server and desktop system that actually make it useful to the average joe. Not everyone using a computer can be an IT professional.
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Yes, but a Kernel by itself is useless. Today people cannot think of linux by itself, but the X-Server and desktop system that actually make it useful to the average joe. Not everyone using a computer can be an IT professional.
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I was just stating the fact that what they taught (that statement) in school still holds true.
I also have a Vaio laptop: PIII 500MHz with 256MB (above recommended) RAM, 30GB harddrive.
Runs perfectly well.
I tried Red Hat 6.2 a few years ago. Like you, I am pretty computer literate, but after spending days trying to get video cards and network settings right, I gave up on Linux. I used BeOS for about a year, but dumped it when Be went belly up and BeOS was no longer under development. I originally experimented with these systems because I was tired of the limitations of OS 9. When OS X was released, I bought a new Macintosh and haven’t looked back since. OS X has everything you’re searching for – it just works!
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OS X has everything you’re searching for – it just works!
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I want one as well….but I don’t have a mac.
Hey Brian,
If you don’t feel Linux is for you, then give FreeBSD a try. If FreeBSD doesn’t solve your opinions/problems, then try something else or whatever.
http://www.bebits.com/app/2680
http://www.beosonline.com/index.php?seite=Download
http://www.lebuzz.com … Lebuzz CD
These are only a few of the places to get BeOS.
bbjimmy
bjimmy.complexero.com/tptb
I thought I could add my own observation here. I have an old Celeron 450 (oc’ed 300) with 192 MB of RAM. It ran Win2k quite good. One day, I decided to try XP Pro on it. I thought: lets see how XP would bring this machine to its knees… I installed XP and, to my surprise, there was no real difference in responsiveness: the computer was still quite fast, even with most of the eye candy turned on. So, XP is still sitting on this machine and I use it to do some real work done with no problem.
To me, this was a strange experience because I saw a more powerful computer (like P-III 733 with 256MB) wich seemed not a lot faster with XP than the Celeron. Maybe it has to do with a combinason of hardware (hard disk, chipset, video card) that would produce a bottleneck somewhere…
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OS X has everything you’re searching for – it just works!
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I totally beleive you, but the Os have a HUGE drawback : it need a mac …
If Apple could release MacOS X on x86 platform, I’ll be the first in line to pay for it …
Hi, a few months ago I tried to install redmond linux on my sisters Celeron 500 with 64Mb of RAM (I think 4 megs of that ram was being used for the video card). And it was sooooo sloooooow, i couldn’t believe how bad it was, it honestly took more than a minute to load the GIMP…
So I blew it away and installed Mandrake 8.1 (KDE 2.2.1 etc). And running KDE, Evolution, Opera, knode, ltris
was fine. It was perfectly useable and ran just as fast as Windows ME on the same box. I Really have no idea what was different with Redmond Linux, but Mandrake was way faster.
My sister initially complained about the speed of Redmond linux, saying she would start and app then go and make a coffee and hopefully it’d be loaded when she got back. But she said Mandrake was fine, just as fast as windows, no probs. I Still don’t know why.
By the way, check out icewm as a window manager, it looks a lot like windows, has nice themes, and works pretty well. It’s not being developed anymore, I really wish someone would take it, add drag’n’drop and desktop icons + some better configuration utilities – then it would be awesome for older hardware. Add directfb support for it and it would fly.
Anyway, that’s just a personal experience I have had, so don’t give up, there is hope
> I have most of my OSes on a dual Celeron 533, and XP is fastest than all
you will need 2 licenses of winxp to run it on that machine. winxp is only licensed for running on one (1) processor.
and frankly, i normally ignore this type of “editorials”. it sounds like something from my boss. my boss says he’s a semi-expert with computers. yet breaks it 2 days after i clean format it and tweak it to run smoothly. he installs so much warez and pirated crap and small hacker apps all at once, then expect everything to work just fine after. he can’t even find the “New” option in office xp’s disappearing menus! oh my god! plus he doesn’t even know how to sync his pocket pc, he doesn’t even know what format is, he doesn’t understand that when accessing webpages its a client-server model (yet says that pages are running on a “server”). he even tries to install a key logger on a colleagues pc without us knowing. of course being the sysadmin that i am, any unknown app is immediately uninstalled, or better yet, the log file is damaged with Edit and made read-only.
this is the problem with PCs. people expect to use them without completely understanding them. it’s like driving cars without really knowing the effects of driving fast or braking hard or swerving too much. it’s like doing business without realizing that you might lose money if you don’t analyze the market. it’s like washing clothes withour reading the instructions of how much soap to put in! fsck! that’s all. i’m having a bad sysadmin day.
anyway… this is the sort of thing redhat has to address. if it’s really slow on celeron machines, then maybe they should put in the requirements a minimum of pentium 2 or something. don’t copy microsofts way of saying that winxp will run on pentium 200mhz with 64 mb ram. be realistic folks.
I’ve got the Windows XP license right infront of me. It states that it is licensed 1-2 CPU’s, the SAME licensing restrictions as the Windows 2000 Professional. Most people who have more than 2 CPU’s aren’t going to be using a Intel based workstation. They’ll normally go for a high end SGI, SUN, HP-UX or AIX machine.
speed, stability was the 2 things that driven me thru the linux world, but all i had is slow, buggy software i had. i’ve tried redhat,suse,corel.. none of them seems to be sufficient as a desktop OS. Wish they were.. but they are not. noone in Linux world seems to care for east installation/uninstallation of software… u got tars, gunzips etc. none of them r fast or easy.. it takes longer to boot than windows, software is less eyecandy than windows, it works slower than windows, its more buggy than windows, its less unique than windows, its less widespread than windows, it has less software than windows, it has less hardware than windows, it has more nerds and geeks than windows, it copyies more than windows(like once ms copied from ms), it is as tricky and froa as microsoft windows(redhat, lindows, xandros…
excuse me but where is linux now after all those year.. u can’t even install a software with a single click, uninstallation is a mystery for a new beginner.. all we get after like 6-7 years is a easy install.. thanks to open source community.. what a progress..
and thnx to Microsoft.. with out MS we could still be in darkness if we only had open source..
There is no denying, GNU/Linux with GNOME (or KDE) just doesn’t perform well and that is the next big thing that has to be improved. Although it will get less and less important the faster the hardware becomes, it shouldn’t be ignored as better performance means that we can stuff even more features in without considerably slowing down the system (though on my not-so-old computer Red Hat 8 performs more than acceptable, file manager starts up instantly just as preloaded browser and many other applications).
Recently I installed Windows 98 again to run a game decently and boy, it was crap. The installation, the first impression, the stability and all was crap. Especially compared to the Red Hat 8 installation I did right after that. This is no surprise of course seeing that Windows 98 is a lot older. But the thing I noticed (and noticed with Windows 2000 too) is simply that it performs MUCH better (with a GUI).
It is not true though that it will only become bigger and more bloated. There isn’t much that is about to be added to the bloat in the real future and most if not all of the current developments are about polishing, stability and performance.
I also agree that Red Hat 8 is a few pitfalls for unexperienced users which should be closed. The system works really well if you don’t touch those but I can understand that this can happen for inexperienced users.
To change desktops without breakage you should have selected them from the “Session” item on the login screen.