[fordgtlover]

Hi

I have played around with various unix ditros over the years and generally gave up pretty quickly because of the hassle of setting it up, and not having any real apps to run.

I just got a copy of Ubuntu 7.10, and quite like it except for one thing. It runs so damn slow. I have a P4 2.8 with 512Mb mem and everything in Ubuntu takes several seconds or more.

Win XP on the same hardware runs fine.

I have tried to turn of all of the flashy stuff in Gnome Desktop.

What am I doing wrong?

 

[iggee85]

Can you be more specific when you say it runs slow?
Do you have a Video Card?
Did you partition a swap drive on install?

 

[fordgtlover]

When I say it runs slow I mean that opening and closing simple applications takes from a few up to 10 seconds. Launching terminal takes 3 or 4 seconds, opening a folder located on another drive takes about 5 seconds.

I have a video card. It's a lowly nVIDIA GeForce4 MX 4000, but it works fine with XP at 1280 x 1024.

As for swap file, I have a reasonably new 80GB drive. I allowed the setup to do whatever it wanted as far as setting up it's own partitions and swap file - default setup.

Cheers

 

[Arainach]

The only time I've had an issue like that is when I had Beryl installed and misconfigured, but I"m pretty sure Beryl isn't shipped stock because of the instabilities. Did you install Xgl/Beryl/Compiz at all?

Alternatively, in a console run "top" and see what process is using all of your memory and/or CPU.

 

[user18]

It runs like ass on mine too. I reinstalled with Feisty, then upgraded to Gutsy. Works without the slowdowns. I don't know what configurations they added to 7.10, but it is slowwwww.

 

[fordgtlover]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arainach /img/forum/go_quote.gif The only time I've had an issue like that is when I had Beryl installed and misconfigured, but I"m pretty sure Beryl isn't shipped stock because of the instabilities. Did you install Xgl/Beryl/Compiz at all? Alternatively, in a console run "top" and see what process is using all of your memory and/or CPU.

I haven't installed it consiously on top of the standard install. I'll rebuild it tonight and try top; fortunately the install is quite fast - big improvement.

 

[iggee85]

Well, you might not have enough memory. I checked my processes and with compiz on, firefox (5 tabs) and a few taskbar apps, I'm already using ~500MB memory.

Xubuntu would probably run a lot smoother on your PC, give the LiveCD a try first though because XFCE might not be to your tastes.

 

[fordgtlover]

Thanks

 

[gritzcolin]

I have personally had much better luck with KDE. Gnome did just what yours does for me and I have a pretty beefy computer. Find Kubuntu or I got PCLinuxOS2007 it works great and is a little more capable out of the box than Ubuntu.

 

[ozz]

would 1gb of ram speed it up ram is cheap right now.

 

[MCC]

Go to system>administration>system monitor and check your RAM usage under the resources tab. If you're running low, adding some RAM might help but in my experience Ubuntu should run just fine on 256MB, let alone 512. While you're there, check the processes tab and sort by CPU usage to see if anything's unnecessarily hogging your resources.

 

[Bizzel]

To be sure that compiz is off and not slowing down your graphics card, run "metacity --replace" from the run dialog (alt+f2).

 

[GAD]

Top will show you stats re: memory on the top:

Code:

[left]top - 20:41:24 up 22:34, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00 Tasks: 71 total, 1 running, 70 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 2.3% us, 0.2% sy, 0.0% ni, 97.4% id, 0.1% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si Mem: 1295700k total, 1211884k used, 83816k free, 41340k buffers [b]Swap: 524280k total, 0k used, 524280k free, 945716k cached[/b][/left]

If the Swap line shows a lot used, then you're swapping. vmstat 5 5 will show you how your swapping, but it's kinda hard to read if you're not used to it.

GAD

 

[GAD]

Ideally you want swap to be unused. If you're swapping (possible running X apps), then yes, more RAM would probably help a great deal.

GAD

 

[Tarkovsky]

Hi there. Such a slowdown is surprising, but RAM is no doubt your issue. For all unix based OSs ram is very important (max os x included), much more so than winblows because it puts everything it can into your ram. My advice is to buy good quality ram thats as fast as your system bus can allow and have at least a gig and probably get rid of your old stick/put it into a wintel box.

I was recently installing ubuntu on an old PC that ran windows fine to no avail because of buggy ram. This RAM thrashing is perhaps a design flaw in linux... But as you say RAM is cheap these days, and I'd rather spend my money on RAM than give it to the robot devil in exchange for an operating system built on untested code as a response to the media industries as opposed to open source tried and tested code.
Rant over.