Why is Mandrake 10 so slow on my system?

[yoast]

Hi,
I am a Linux newbie and just installed Mandrake 10 on my dual boot (XP/Linux) PC. Installation was a dream and so is Mandrake Linux, I think.
However, the whole thing is incredibly slow: it usually takes at least 20 - 30 sec. for any program, even a 'simple' Konsole, to start and also the internet connection behaves more like a 14k4 than the ADSL it actually is. This impression of sluggishness is compared to my polluted XP Home system that runs on the same PC..
I suppose/hope/wish that there is some misconfiguration here rather than this being a Mandrake characteristic and so I hope someone can help me out and point me where to look for a possible sollution.
You can find the specs of my system below and a print of the header of 'top'.

Thanks in advance for any help!

---------------------------------------------------
Mandrake Linux 10 on
AMD Athlon 1700 XP
256 MB Ram
/ on hdd1
500 Mb swap on hdd5
/home on hdd6
graphics card : Kyro

'top' output

top - 22:05:12 up 1:51, 0 users, load average: 0.87, 0.42, 0.25
Tasks: 97 total, 2 running, 95 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 22.6% us, 2.3% sy, 0.0% ni, 74.8% id, 0.3% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 256096k total, 206124k used, 49972k free, 6728k buffers
Swap: 511520k total, 19208k used, 492312k free, 95108k cached

[30111987]

hmm, strange
mandrake 9.2 runs fast on my celeron 800mhz...

as for your internet, try getting the approprtiate driver, as the built in one may not be the best for your modem

what packages do you have installed?

[kjbunete]

Tell us more of your Linux configuration that you told for it to install, and tell us about your Hardware. Sometimes linux finds an strange bottleneck.

I'm running M10 with a PIII 733 and it's running faster than a P4 with XP!

[yoast]

I figure it might be the Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 graphics card with Kyro chipset that seems to be notorious in combination with linux. Though it was recognised by Mandrake installation, I get the impression that Kyro drivers and kernel 2.6 do not go together very well (see also http://www.powervr.com/Downloads/Drivers/Index.asp )
I'll give it a try with another graphics card and see what happens.

As for the internet connection I still don't know; the PC is connected throught a network cable to an ADSL modem/router. Do I need drivers for that kind of config?

[Trillian]

Compile your own kernel. If you do this, your system is for **your** computer. It'll work a bit faster, perhaps.
Furthermore, I don't know what kind of wm your using, but wms like GNOME and KDE are eating up a whole bit of your CPU load. You could consider a light window manager, such as icewm, blackbox, fluxbox, window maker, ...

Is your swap turned on? It might not be configured yet, which might be a problem.


And offcourse you need drivers to connect to the internet. You connect using a network card, and that needs drivers. Pretty easy, tho. Isn't your network configured yet? I thought mandrake did that at the installation.

[yoast]

Somehow the problem had to do with the combination of Mandrake 9 / 10 and KDE 3.2 since other Window managers as well as the latest Knoppix did not have the problem of extremely slow startups of programs.
That put me on the following lead
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=190636
and setting a "hostname" under "internet connection settings" indeed did the trick.

thanks!

[nibby]

Do not have many programs run in the background.