Starting applications require LOTS of disc activity and a LONG time. eg Netscape takes about 2 minutes to load.
I am afraid that running large applications (netscape, star office, etc) in a Linux GUI environment (I am assuming you are running KDE here) does require a lot of memory. In your case, 32 Mb may be a bit tight. If you can upgrade to 64 Mb, you will notice quite a difference running these large applications. Other things to do, include : Installing and running a 'lighter' window manager - I use 'black box with KDE extensions' instead of the standard KDE window manager (this is on the Mandrake disks, not sure about SuSE ?), and find it a *lot* lighter on memory requirements. For example, on a P60/32 Mb RAM, starting 'normal' KDE sets the machine off swapping to disk like mad (it would appear that on my system, KDE runs (with everything else of course) with about 39 Mb in use). Using blackbox keeps this down to 29 Mb. You could also free up some other memory in the system, for example, if you do not require many virtual consoles, reduce this down to (say) 2. Typical installations install 6 (see the file /etc/inittab). You could also see how many instances of the web server (apache) are running - if your machine is a desktop, ie not serving web pages, you could either uninstall this, or cut down the number of servers initialised, etc. There are various ways of freeing up some memory, but an investment to 64 Mb will not go amiss ... I tend to think of Linux + X + KDE + larger apps as requiring the same sort of memory/maching requirements as Windows NT. I run X on a machine with 32 Mb fine - but I don't use the large apps (netscape/star office/etc). Just my thoughts ... Kevin. Northants Linux Users Group.