Re: Suse 10.1 runs slow



jim wrote:
I have just installed suse 10.1 with KDE on a machine with 500MHz processor,128MB ram and 19GB hard drive and it takes an age for applications to load (over a minute for firefox and even longer for office).

Taken from http://www.novell.com/products/suselinux/sysreqs.html

"The following requirements should be met to ensure smooth operation of SUSE Linux 10.1:
Processor: Intel: Pentium 1-4 or Xeon; AMD: Duron, Athlon, Athlon XP, Athlon MP, Athlon 64, Sempron or Opteron
Main memory: At least 256 MB; 512 MB recommended"

Your memory is only 50% of the minimum spec, and only 25% of the recommended amount. I'm guessing your system is doing a severe amount of swapping to disk as a result which will kill performance.

Previously the machine had win98 with slackware linux running on a 3GB partition and it worked fine (although I have a vague recollection of some teething problems wth x windows).

Newer distros of any OS get fatter as they add more features so trying to compare SUSE 10.1 to Win98 (an 8 year old OS!!!) is very unfair. A much fairer comparison would be to try to compare SUSE 10.1 with M$ Vista, the latest M$ release if, or when, it ever gets released. No-one in their right mind would try to install Vista on a box with the spec you are using, so the very fact that SUSE runs at all is a bonus and says something positive about linux! I believe M$ recommend 1Gb of RAM for Vista! Just imagine how Vista would run in 128Mb if you could even install it.

any help would be appreciated

With a computer with the spec you have, you might want to try some of the lighter distros which require less powerful hardware. Something like Damn Small Linux (DSL) should run a LOT faster than SUSE in this case.
.



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