I met a guy at a Windows Server event yesterday. He told me that he has a 2.4GB Athalon with 2GB of memory. He tells me that it is slow to load (eg. sluggish). And, in his own words: "Windows XP boots faster, is more responsive, and the GUI is quick compared to what has happened in the Linux releases of the last year".

He initially had been using GNOME, but switched to KDE (Red Hat 8). Also, he built the kernel optimized for Athalon. The one issue I don't know is whether he is using DMA or not.

He is considering using SuSE, but I would like to see if anyone on

Hello, Don't you think it sounds quite ridiculous? How did this guy measure speed of WinXP vs. Linux? With the choronometer - (ready, set, go! on bootup), series of perfomance tests, or just subjectively to his own feelings and the mood of the moment? Do you really care which system boots faster? Linux can run for years without rebooting, WinXP as well as its previous versions has a recommended time period for so called "maintenance" reboots. In my own experience a had a Linux server (connected to UPS of course) which ran for four years without rebooting. I had to take it down only when CPU's heat sink fan got busted. Alex ------------------- this

forum can add some insight based on the scant bit of information I have posted. My home system is a 700Mhz P3 and my laptop is a 1.2Ghz P3. Mozilla and OpenOffice tend to be slow to load because they are huge, but I don't see any sluggishness.

On Wednesday 14 May 2003 11:51 am, Alex Daniloff wrote:

Hello, Don't you think it sounds quite ridiculous? How did this guy measure speed of WinXP vs. Linux? With the choronometer - (ready, set, go! on bootup), series of perfomance tests, or just subjectively to his own feelings and the mood of the moment? Do you really care which system boots faster? Linux can run for years without rebooting, WinXP as well as its previous versions has a recommended time period for so called "maintenance" reboots. In my own experience a had a Linux server (connected to UPS of course) which ran for four years without rebooting. I had to take it down only when CPU's heat sink fan got busted.

Alex

I can believe him... I installed 8.2 on 4 machines, both AMD and Intel and they all worked just fine. But the install on the 5th (AMD) was slow as a dog for no apparent reason. And it's a total SCSI machine and very similar to another machine I have that was working fine. But things were terribly slow, in particular bringing up new windows. StarOffice for example (yes it's a pig) would take forever to come up (contrary to the 8.0 performance on the same machine) and would open just a 'frame' for the main window. That would sit there for a minute or two and finally it would fill in the frame. But even then, when the program looked like it was up and running, it wouldn't accept any keybd or mouse inputs for another minute or two. TOP didn't show anything out of the ordinary and didn't even show SO on the first page. I recompiled the kernel to my liking to see if it would help and it's been fine since. I still have the distro kernel so I may go back and play with it. BTW, this same machine was running a 2.4.20 kernel under 8.0 so the problem shouldn't have been any major changes in the kernel.

-------------------

...

I met a guy at a Windows Server event yesterday. He told me that he

has

...

a 2.4GB Athalon with 2GB of memory. He tells me that it is slow to

load

...

(eg. sluggish). And, in his own words: "Windows XP boots faster, is more responsive, and the GUI is quick compared to what has happened in the Linux releases of the

last

...

year".

He initially had been using GNOME, but switched to KDE (Red Hat 8). Also, he built the kernel optimized for Athalon. The one issue I

don't

...

know is whether he is using DMA or not.

He is considering using SuSE, but I would like to see if anyone on

this

...

forum can add some insight based on the scant bit of information I

have

...

posted. My home system is a 700Mhz P3 and my laptop is a 1.2Ghz P3. Mozilla and OpenOffice tend to be slow to load because they are

huge,

...

but I don't see any sluggishness.

-- +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ + Bruce S. Marshall bmarsh@bmarsh.com Bellaire, MI 05/14/03 13:03 + +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ "When there's a will, I want to be in it!"

Our nt/w98 lan ran a lot faster with professional engineers coming in to install and maintain it than my pathetic amateurish attempts with 8.1 and NIS and NFS. But we make do. And it costs a little less. In a school on a tight budget, quantity and quality uptime is much more important than engineering. By 9.1 SuSE lan's will be just as fast with amateurs installing

Looks like you're doing the same mistake (as the originator of initial posting), in subjective judgement of the OS speed - Linux vs. Windows. How do you measure NT/W98 vs. Linux linux speed across the LAN? Have you ran any comparative scalability vs. number of connection tests on these two systems? Can you provide any data or numbers. If not, this is just a plain speculations. We have ran comparative scalability tests on WinXP Server vs. SuSE 8.1 server. Here is the outcome in short: WinXP "server" started to faze out just after 30 simultaneous client connections/sec, completely stumbled at 85 and crashed at 93. We repeated the test at 150 conn/sec and this time WinXP was displaying infamous BSOD. Linux server sustained 127 simultaneous client connection/sec without noticeable lost in performance and started to show 15% degraded performance after 278 connections/sec. We cranked up number of connection/sec up to 400 and the system was running about 50% slower but rock stable. The test were done on absolutely identical hardware. This demonstration was enough to convince our management to make Linux our company wide standard for the servers and engineering workstations. Alex ------------------- them. Leaving

many without jobs.

Steve. Sierra Bernia School, Alfaz del Pi, Alicante 7:31pm up 117 days, 9:46, 8 users, load average: 0.81, 0.70, 0.52

-- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

I measure lan speed by the reaction of my students who use it for

everyday work. Just try openoffice. We can't afford professional unix nor microsoft solutions anymore so we chose SuSE Linux instead. Now for

Steve, OpenOffice has nothing particularly to do with LAN nor with the Linux OS speed in general. It's slow application on its own, especially when it's starting up. I wish OO developers could improve its speed or may be create server-daemon version of OO which persistently runs in a server background, listens to client host connections and launches application upon request. Alex ------------------- their the

figures. Before Linux: lesson starts in about 10 minutes. Linux around 15. By next term I hope to reverse that. And I shall. Cheers, Steve.

On Wed, 14 May 2003, fsanta wrote:

On Wednesday 14 May 2003 21:43, you wrote:

...

Steve, OpenOffice has nothing particularly to do with LAN nor with the Linux OS speed in general.

Yes it does, especially to us. Because that's what we use! We used to use excel which was instantaneous under nt. Now we use Linux. Instead. And we like it. But it's slow. Because I installed it. Yours is much faster. Cheers. Steve.

You could look at LTSP if you have a good server. Once cached in the server it loads fast on all workstations. -- (o< //\ Powered by SuSE Linux V_/_ Virusproof. Crashproof. 4:38pm up 4 days, 42 min, 28 users, load average: 1.35, 1.35, 1.36 processes 574102

On Wed, 2003-05-14 at 15:08, Lenz Grimmer wrote:

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On Wed, 14 May 2003, Dennis Tuchler wrote:

...

Is there a desktop, a little less loaded down with features than KDE or Gnome, but still reasonably useful? I am using SuSE 8.2 and find that both desktops are much slower than they were under 8.0, and suspect that with less stuff going on in the background, I can get a little more speed up front.

Have a look at XFCE: http://www.xfce.org/

Bye, LenZ

Thank you for the reference to the xfce site. I left some questions there. dj tuchler

- -- - ------------------------------------------------------------------ Lenz Grimmer -o) [ICQ: 160767607 | Jabber: LenZGr@jabber.org] /\\ http://lenz.grimmer.com V_V -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2-rc1-SuSE (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://quantumlab.net/pine_privacy_guard/

iD8DBQE+wlveSVDhKrJykfIRAudGAJ48O7G/pxFGJHVQ8M/q7FJjDzwCfwCfW9rx FJeZshKQ7+QQnmPBcqo+5wA= =evny -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Dennis Tuchler

Thank you for your suggestions. The help I have received has so added to my choices that I will likely spend more time looking and testing than I will save working with the selected desktop. Where do I get blackbox? I recall the last time I downloaded it (wherefrom, I do not recall) and tried to install it, I was told by the configure program that I needed an armload of lib and other files, which I had no idea how to get. Is the home page of blackbox informative as to where to get such files? Thanks again dj tuchler On Wed, 2003-05-14 at 15:53, Curtis Rey wrote:

XFCE is also included on the 8.2 discs and I find it very fast, lightweight, and more configurable - as far as ease of use ragarding end user configurations. Another lightweight wm is blackbox. It is similar to XFCE insofar as being fast, lightweight, and configurable - but not quite as user friendly as XFCE IMHO.

And lastly, my two favorite WMs outside of KDE (Gnome maybe back in the running now that is seems more functional - the jury's out still) is:

WindowMaker; it is fast and configurable, has many of it's own applets yet SuSE has folding in access to a full range of programs via the menu. It has a couple of package that go with it - WMs own config and settings programs. These to make the look and feel customizable and the other makes it possible to tweak menus and things deeper down in the WM. The only thing is that while tweaking the look and feel is pretty easy and harmless. The other can get you into a tad bit of trouble if you make a mistake with the config tool - this is remedied by deleting the folder in the /home/<user> for WindowMaker and then relog in - but they all do this IIRC (you don't loose anything like docs, etc, but go back to the defaults). It also has many themes and looks. Pretty nice

Enlightenment: My other favorite. And I'm much happier with the latest version in 8.2. It to has all the KDE/SuSE and Gnome entries in the menu preset. You can add more if you want, but takes a bit of work since it isn't exactly intuitive to a newb/end-user - though doable. However SuSE, by popular demand I suspect, put back and configured a full set of "Epplets". Applets that are fairly small, fast, and easy to setup and use - the defaults are set in th menu already. It's very configurable and has many themes and the look and feel can be changed easily - not to mention added on later. I have been spending a fair amount of time in this lately getting reacquanted :)

Check these out. That should keep you busy! :)

Cheers, Curtis. -- Dennis Tuchler

On Wednesday 14 May 2003 06:57, Dennis Tuchler wrote:

...

Have a look at XFCE: http://www.xfce.org/

Bye, LenZ

Thank you for the reference to the xfce site. I left some questions there.

You could also try the XFce mailing list (subscription info at http://moongroup.com/mailman/listinfo/xfce). FWIW, I've built a SuSE-ified rpm of 3.8.18, the last 3.x release, for 8.2 (which comes with version 3.8.16). Let me know if you want a copy (binary and/or src.rpm). -- Scott Jones (scott at exti dot net)

Quoting Lenz Grimmer :

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1

On Wed, 14 May 2003, Dennis Tuchler wrote:

...

Is there a desktop, a little less loaded down with features than KDE or Gnome, but still reasonably useful? I am using SuSE 8.2 and find that both desktops are much slower than they were under 8.0, and suspect that with less stuff going on in the background, I can get a little more speed up front.

Have a look at XFCE: http://www.xfce.org/ ======================================== Do a google search for ratpoison and/or ion. Both are quite sparse, but very functional. Mike

-- "The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life." --Muhammad Ali

On Wed, 2003-05-14 at 15:19, U L Y S S E S wrote:

http://www.fvwm.org/

Thank you! I have a version of fvwm already loaded under SuSE 8.2. I wonder if SuSE put the files in the same place that a person loading fvwm for the first time would have had them placed. dj tuchler

O. L.

Dennis Tuchler wrote:

...

Is there a desktop, a little less loaded down with features than KDE or Gnome, but still reasonably useful? I am using SuSE 8.2 and find that both desktops are much slower than they were under 8.0, and suspect that with less stuff going on in the background, I can get a little more speed up front.

thanks for your time

-- Dennis Tuchler