Switching from Gentoo

[blakegrover]

I have been running Gentoo for the past 2 years on my machine at work and I also have it on my laptop. A couple of weeks ago I decided to take Gentoo off my latop and install kubuntu. The installation went great and it was as fast and responsive as gentoo was on my laptop. One thing that was strange is when I would run glxgears it wouldn't report how many frames per second and it was very slow. But it is using the generic driver and to get it working is another story. What my main problem is I put Kubuntu on my computer at work this week but it seems to be running overall slower than gentoo. Here are the stats on my machines:

Laptop
1.7Ghz Pentium M 2MB cache 533mhz FSB
1.0 GB Ram
80 GB Hard drive
DVD Burner
ATI Mobile X300 With 64 MB Ram

Machine at work
1.7Ghz Pentium 4
512 MB Ram
80 GB HD
Intel Onboard video i810

When I run hdparm -tT on my main hard drive this is what the numbers are:

Timing cached reads: 808 MB in 2.01 seconds = 401.45 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 26 MB in 3.09 seconds = 8.40 MB/sec

On my second hard drive it is the following

Timing cached reads: 788 MB in 2.00 seconds = 393.08 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 4.34 seconds = 14.75 MB/sec

I think the hard drives are ok. When I run firefox, konsole and kate my basic programs I use, it is kinda slow and top displays this info after runing firefox and kate after turning on the computer:

Tasks: 108 total, 2 running, 106 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 5.6% us, 1.3% sy, 0.0% ni, 92.7% id, 0.3% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 514988k total, 445424k used, 69564k free, 8472k buffers
Swap: 1244996k total, 0k used, 1244996k free, 138852k cached

I would appreciate any help or suggestions. I have updated my kernel to 2.6.12-10-686 and I fixed gaim_server from hogging a lot of memory due to the kde 3.5 upgrade. But other than that I am not sure what else to do......

Blake

[blakegrover]

Re: Switching from Gentoo

In gentoo I made all of my kernels from the source and I notice in kubuntu it just installs them. Would I benefit installing a kernel from scratch and how do you do that in kubuntu? I have seen many using the latest kernel 2.16.15 but I don't see it with apt-get.

[MrBoe]

Re: Switching from Gentoo

Just give it a try.
Here you can find instructions:

http://wiki.debianforum.de/DebianizedLinuxKernel

Download a Vanilla Kernel and configure it.
As you create a debian package, you can install and uninstall the kernel clean and easy, if it not working.

[blakegrover]

Re: Switching from Gentoo

Thanks for the suggestion. But I can't understand much on that page. Does anyone know how to do it in English. But thanks for your help MrBoe

[MrBoe]

Re: Switching from Gentoo

Sorry, I forgot it's an english forum.
Here you can find all (and perhaps more than all) information you need in english:
http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/system/kernel-pkg.html

And don't be afraid, if the new kernel is not working, you can choose your old one in grub and simply remove the not working one with "dpkg -r kernelimage-bla.deb".
Just make sure, that you use a newer version, so that all you modules are still present.

Good Luck, and take your time to configure the kernel properly (1-2 hours).
If you use xconfig, and you can since you have a running system, there is much documentation inside the configuration.

[askrieger]

Re: Switching from Gentoo

Your disk speeds don't look all thet terrific to me. Are they comparable to what you were getting with Gentoo? The reason I ask is that Ubuntu tends to install with the "safest", not the "fastest" values of hdparm. IIRC, I had to make some changes in my /etc/hdparm.conf file to tweak things up.

[blakegrover]

Re: Switching from Gentoo

On my hdparm I have enabled 32 bit/sync and made sure udma5 the highest the drive can do is default, switching to the 32 bit helped a little but I don't remember it being that bad of a result when I had gentoo. I also recompiled the kernel to enable preempt and that helped a little.