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Original post by Anonymous Poster
openoffice is also notorious for startup times. Complain to the OOo people, maybe they''ll fix their POS software.

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Some would say that "POS" is an acronym trolls use.

Man I''ve also been looking for some linux. Redhat was too slow and crashed. same with Mandrake (which seemed jsut like redhat). I''ve downloaded peanut but I just can''t get it to work with my network.
All I want is something that will allow me to set up with the adsl and act as a web server. That''s it. I don''t need any gui interface. Nothing. Just a web server.

The reasons that some distributions of linux feel slower than others, is that they are usually optmized for different architectures, at times, like if I remember correctly, RedHat, is still just a i386-compiled distro, where as SuSE & Mandrake are i586. With Gentoo you can actually have it compiled to your system, based on how aggressive your compile flags are, Gnome 2.2 is actually fairly decent for me, it does feel slow at times, but I more think that is to do with the fact that I only have 256 MB ram. Although I didn''t like the drivers for the Radeon cards in linux at all, they didn''t really perform/behave too well for me, although it could have improved, I would try downloading ati''s drivers and installing those, as opposed to the default XFree86 4.3 driver, that ships with RedHat.

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Original post by Null and Void
Michalson is just trolling. Most of it is probably just mis-setup video drivers; it''s unfortunate, but it happens. OpenOffice has always been relatively slow to open, the new beta (1.1) is much quicker.

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Or maybe I''m not (it seems a number of other people have the opinion that RedHat is slow too).

If you want the reason for my opinion it''s because I''ve had the opportunity to run RedHat 8 and Win2K side by side. Not in some dual boot environment where everything is subjective (hmm, this seems faster then why I had Linix running), but in a side by side environment. Both running on nearly identical IBM Netvista machines (the only difference was that the Red Hat system had been upgraded to a 733 while Win2K only had a 667). Motherboard used Intel graphics fully supported by Redhat, 128MB ram each and identical 10GB harddrives with clean installs. While bootup was identical (to within seconds, at least with KDE where I tested it) between the two, the actual operation between the two over the few weeks that I used them was not. Whether running KDE or Gnome (Gnome much worse) the Red Hat setup constantly had an annoying lag even in basic operations (this is without actually running any additional apps, just navigating the file system). There was also the usual lack of polish in mouse handling, resulting in a need to slow down movements to ensure everything was done correctly. As I mentioned in my post Redhat also has a serious lack of polish in it''s implementation (for instance the "Press the next button" when the only button there is marked "Continue" in the Redhat update manager).

While my personal opinion may be that Linux is not ready for the desktop (it makes a good server OS, and in many roles is hands down better than a Windows server), Redhat takes the cake as an all around bad Distro. Redhat is like the AOL of the Linux world: It''s easy to install and use for beginners with lots of nice graphics, but has crippling performance (a lot of which is the fault of X-Windows) and major screw ups. If you have to use Linux, use another distro (and fast, Redhat seems to want to make itself the Microsoft of the Linux world with it''s newer more restrictive licences, higher prices for the non-crippleware version, and dropping support for old versions so fast you''ll find yourself out of date before the install is done)

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Original post by Michalson
Whether running KDE or Gnome (Gnome much worse) the Red Hat setup constantly had an annoying lag even in basic operations (this is without actually running any additional apps, just navigating the file system).

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I still think it''s at least in part mis-setup video drivers. Maybe something with XRender not being accelerated for whatever reason? (Not to say another distro would have set everything up correctly.)

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Original post by Michalson
There was also the usual lack of polish in mouse handling, resulting in a need to slow down movements to ensure everything was done correctly.

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Not to say you''re wrong or whatever, but I don''t know what you mean by "lack of polish in mouse handling". Was it just some side effect of the random sluggishness?

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Original post by Michalson
As I mentioned in my post Redhat also has a serious lack of polish in it''s implementation (for instance the "Press the next button" when the only button there is marked "Continue" in the Redhat update manager).

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Yes, I saw your screen shot a while back, but it was irrelevent to the topic at hand. I''m no gigantic fan of Red Hat (I normally download and try new versions, as I do for a couple distributions, but I don''t use Red Hat anymore), so I don''t think I''m defending it unfairly.

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Original post by Michalson
Redhat is like the AOL of the Linux world: It''s easy to install and use for beginners with lots of nice graphics, but has crippling performance (a lot of which is the fault of X-Windows) and major screw ups.

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Why do you insist on blaming "X-Windows" rather than XFree86 or Red Hat (Kudzu to be more specific on the latter)? X11 itself isn''t at fault for a particular problem in an implementation or configuration. The common evidence suggests XFree86 runs fine with proper drivers when it''s setup correctly; I doubt it could if its protocol was at fault.

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Original post by Michalson lots of insults of Redhat

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Wow, that is, um well, interesting... With the topic of XF86 being at fault, look at my earlier post, I would think that the original poster would benefit greatly from using ATI''s drivers, instead of the standard XF86 4.3 set, no matter what distro he uses.
RH is only "crippleware" because they can''t afford to get the licenses for the software (MP3 decoder, dvd reader, etc) and distribute the system for free, and make a profit.SuSE is the same way, only with Mplayer/Xine. I personally don''t use Redhat, because I don''t like the way it feels, but that shouldn''t stop people who are new to linux from trying to.
I have used RH for most versions since 6.2, and I don''t really think it is a particularly bad distro, and it is probably better than any code that AOL could write, although none of us will ever find that out unless they make their own OS/Distro of linux.

I think I''m going to do one of two things:

1) Install a more concise distro such as Slackware and see how it does running X.

2) Just run redhat in console mode, like I''ve done in the past.

I don''t really need to use Linux all that much. I think I''m going to opt towards #1. It''ll cost me a little extra time setting things up, but it will probably be worth it. I like having a Linux graphical environment, that way I don''t have to restart to Win2K when I want to surf a webpage (NOT using lynx) or watch a DVD or something.

That's a fairly new video card, and while xFree provides some support for it, it's similar to Windows; On Windows you get good 2D out-of-box, but no 3D. For many cards (all nVidia and lots of others) under linux/xfree86 you only get mediocre 2D out-of-box. (Think of the times you’ve started Windows an got a very low resolution screen and 4bit color when the graphics driver weren’t right or had a card it didn’t support).

Download the latest RH kernel (it'll be either an i686 or an Athlon optimized build) and then get linux drivers from ATI and install those. If you update the kernel second, you will likely have to install the video card drivers again. (Also, if anything goes bad, you can boot the old kernel).

With his system 'redhat bloat' is not the problem.

Checking the hostname is also a very good idea - if you changed the host name but did not add it to the /etc/hosts file many things will run poorly (if at all) because they time-out resolving the host-name.

[edited by - Magmai Kai Holmlor on August 4, 2003 4:25:56 PM]

I agree! Linux is not ready for the desktop... BUT BSD IS!

Just read: http://students.hightechhigh.org/~jjensen/freebsd.html