I installed kubuntu and it's very sloow...

[Guest]

I just installed the latest distro of kubuntu and it takes maybe 6 or 7 minutes to boot. Once logged in I have to wait for another 15 minutes to get the desktop and the harddrive keeps going all the time, but it responds to my mouse and I can open the start menu etc although I have to wait a lot for things to happen.

The system I have installed it has the following specs:

Pentium II 450MHz
256MB RAM
Matrox G450 16Mb
12 GB Seagate drive

I know it's a bit old but I wonder if it is possible to tweak the installation so that it is usable. I tried to install FreeBSD but it freezes on boot and won't even launch X. I'm also open for suggestions on other distros that may be more suitable for this hardware configuration.

[dibl]

Re: I installed kubuntu and it's very sloow...

Your system memory is at the official minimum, and that 12GB hard drive can't be very snappy, either. But probably it is your Matrox GPU that is the "weakest link", at least as far as the visual feedback on screen.

Depending on what your intended use is, I would steer you away from KDE as the desktop environment, and to something lighter like Xfce. Also, you don't want to run Firefox as your browser -- it is the most demanding on your GPU. Google Chrome gives a noticeably faster performance, even on my relatively fast hardware.

As for other distros to try, give Xubuntu a try and see if Xfce is faster. Other things to try:

- Slax (with KDE 3.5)

- sidux (Xfce)

- E-live (I'm not sure whether the download is still free or not.) This one has the E17 desktop, which seems very light but still full-featured.


As far as tweaking, here are some things to do, but don't expect a dramatic improvement -- it's incremental stuff.


EDIT: You didn't mention your swap space -- you need a ~400MB partition for swapping.

[miKeyBabid]

Re: I installed kubuntu and it's very sloow...

If Dibl's suggestions don't make a significant improvement, you may also be interested in puppy linux's latest version, which is built on Lucid's binary packages. It's particularly good at running on older hardware. Here's a link to some further information.

Mike

[spaffel]

Re: I installed kubuntu and it's very sloow...

You may also want to take a look at Lubuntu.

[Guest]

Re: I installed kubuntu and it's very sloow...

I just wanna say thank you for your suggestions. They have been really helpful. I have looked through them all and I found that Puppy and Lubuntu were the winning candidates. Since I want to be faithful I chose Lubuntu and it works fine on that system.

I didn't know the GPU was so bad. During the beginning of the 2000's Matrox got a reputation for making solid GPUs that performed at best in 2D and had good reliable drivers. The memory is 32MB and it's performance is about the same as a Riva TNT2 which admittedly is not much to brag about today.

The slowest component of the computer is no doubt the harddrive, it is slow as molasses. A simple update takes 3 hours which was a big surprise for me to discover. I used to believe that hard drives was the one component that hasn't changed much over the years in terms of speed only in terms of size. But I was wrong ...

[Snowhog]

Re: I installed kubuntu and it's very sloow...

The slowest component of the computer is no doubt the harddrive, it is slow as molasses. A simple update takes 3 hours which was a big surprise for me to discover. I used to believe that hard drives was the one component that hasn't changed much over the years in terms of speed only in terms of size. But I was wrong ...

A 'slow' HD isn't a problem with a long update. The amount of installed RAM and the speed of your CPU will have a far greater impact on overall speed of processes on your PC.

[GreyGeek]

Re: I installed kubuntu and it's very sloow...

...
you may also be interested in puppy linux's latest version,
...
Mike

I second that suggestion!

I installed Kubuntu Jaunty on a machine similar to yours for a friend. It was SLOOOOWWW... The fellow complained about the slowness and after I explainrf the reasons why it was slow I suggested Puppy 4.3.1 (which was the latest at the time). Puppy turned that machine into a speed daemon.

However, (isn't there always one!), while he loved the speed he had a taste of the KDE 4.3 desktop and missed its mime power and flexibility, to say nothing of its beauty. To my surprise, when I asked a couple months later how he was doing, on his own he had installed Kubuntu 10.4 (which IS faster than 9.10) and now enjoys KDE 4.4.3. He says it is still slow, although not quite as slow as Jaunty was, but he can live with the speed to get the power.