Sam MacDonald wrote: > I installed Redhat 6.2 and KDE is at least 200% faster then on Redhat > 8.0. It just runs smooth even with 64 mb RAM it out performs the Redhat > 8.0 install. > > If I could I would go to the beer meeting and show you all it isn't the > hardware. I've done this on 2 desktops and 3 laptops, every time it's > the same thing. Redhat 6.2 is faster then 8.0 on older hardware. > > I would like to do the same with Slackware and Debian to see if the > kernel versions cause the slow down. From 2.X to 2.4. If it's the > version of KDE so be it, I believe it's the Kernel changes. more then likely it's just due to general software bloat in everything from the C libraries (glibc), the kernel itself and user land programs. With each release of any Linux distro, things keep getting bigger. I think the rationale behind it is that disk is cheap and cpus are much faster these days so who cares. I doubt too many developers are still running on 386, 486, or even 586 systems anymore, so they code for what the current hardware is. One thing you could do is build a custom kernel and take out all the drivers that you don't need and make the ones you do modular. This keeps the kernel footprint smaller and leaves more free memory. Most distros have bloated kernels just so that "everything works out of the box" on most hardware. Beware on laptops though: you'll need to build both the kernel and pcmcia to get back on a network (assuming you don't have a built in ethernet card). Another tip for speed: try running Netscape 4.79 instead of mozilla on a current distro. It works for most websites still and runs *MUCH* faster. I'm running Slackware 9.1 on a PII-350 with 512 MB RAM and it's a noticable difference. -- scot _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list