I''m not sure it is just disk access or what..

I havn''t put my finger on it yet.. it is almost as if I''m not getting alot of cpu time or something.


Fwiw, vim for instance is quite slow (subjective I know) as well.
There is a noticable delay in the vim window showing up as well as just not being very responsive (slow in taking keys, slow in redrawing screen, etc.). Almost as if I''m connected remotly or something. (reminds me of logging into an old bbs at 2400baund )

I grabbed two logs of ''iostat -d -w 1'' activity, the first was with ''startx'' with windowmaker not setup right (got vanilla x, no wm at all.. *shrug*). The second was after kde (finally ~15min at a guess) loaded and I finally got a term window open. Loaded kview and a picture.. never did get a file manager open (it said it loaded, but nothing ever showed up... similar to what happended with root, save those eventually showed up as I shutdown). .... It is very wierd. (slow graphics redraw as well, but I figure that is just the current nv driver (default ones from XF86). On a related note Gnome2 complains about bonobo and basically does not work. Really doubt there is any relation to the sluggishness though.

Anyway summery of iostate:
X-load: (ended up with vanilla X)
Count: 51
AVG 0.053921569
Max: 0.72
Total: 2.75
(p.s. This was the fastest I''ve seen X showup, X''s startup messages are normally onscreen for a while.. they flashed by this time... no idea.)


InKde:
Count: 362
AVG 0.006657459
Max: 0.22
Total: 2.41

To me the max MB/s looks really low but I''ve no idea.
Count is the number of samples taken (at 1sec intervals, of course)

As for ports and such... Aye! Can''t say I dislike how BSD does things so far... the port of clanlib is waaay out of date though (I have not connected to the net yet with it so I''m not sure if I''m stuck with vim 6.1 for a while or if the vim 6.2 will work with my bsd release .. I''m a touch confused on that still.)

Anyway so far so good, just have to figure out how to get it to go faster now, heh

Doesn''t look like your disk is under much usage, either that it is so buggy you''re not even going over 2MB/s =). This is doubtful though.

You could check to see if anything is eating up your CPU. Run ''top -S'' and then when in top, type ''o'', then type ''cpu'' and hit enter. This will sort your process list by cpu usage. Idle should be in the high 90''s most of the time, unless you''re running something with CPU demands. You could also use the graphical perfmon in X. I usually use Gnome, it''s in System Tools in the menu I think. If you poke around you can find it.

You might want to check your X performance. Do some searches for your Video card, see if they have their own native linux drivers. You could also make sure you X setup is properly using extensions and such.

Try a quick run with ''glxgears'' in X. This will run a window for a while, displaying fps.

You can also run ''glxinfo''. This will give you a lot of information about your cards openGl support. You can also find a line early on saying "Direct Rendering Yes" (or will say no). This will let you know if you''re using the DRI extension.

As for the newer ports, you could update your ports. You can look at www.freebsd.org and head to the handbook, look up Cutting Edge or something similar.

Int

Fwiw I was getting 17kbs during install off cd for alot of the time during instilation of kde/gnome2 and dependancies (gaah that took a while). ... cd went from 170kbs~ at the high (only saw it once I think) to a probable average of 50kbs ... lots of pauses like it was clearing cash or something, it was not a constant transfer, anyway...

My controler I do believe:
atapci0: <VIA 82C686 ATA100 controller> port 0xd000-0xd00f at device 7.1 on pci0

It looks like whatever is irq11 is eating half my cpu time... I certinaly hope that isn't normal ... idle time (assuming I'm reading it right) never went about 1% while I was looking at it.).

For good measure I'm including an abrevated 5 (dan I forget the term).. well 5 frames anyway of top (`top -Socpu -d5` if I recall right)

  PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND   21 root     -68 -187     0K    12K RUN      8:03 49.37% 49.37% irq11: dc0 ac    7 root     -84    0     0K    12K actask   2:13 11.23% 11.23% acpi_task2    6 root     -84    0     0K    12K actask   2:13 11.18% 11.18% acpi_task1    5 root     -84    0     0K    12K actask   2:13 10.69% 10.69% acpi_task0   19 root     -28 -147     0K    12K WAIT     0:11 10.64% 10.64% swi5: acpitas   11 root     -16    0     0K    12K RUN      0:20  0.93%  0.93% idle   38 root     171   52     0K    12K pgzero   0:04  0.00%  0.00% pagezero  PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND   21 root     -68 -187     0K    12K *Giant   8:04 48.88% 48.88% irq11: dc0 ac    7 root     -84    0     0K    12K actask   2:13 11.62% 11.62% acpi_task2    6 root     -84    0     0K    12K actask   2:13 11.18% 11.18% acpi_task1    5 root     -84    0     0K    12K actask   2:13 10.74% 10.74% acpi_task0   19 root     -28 -147     0K    12K WAIT     0:11 10.50% 10.50% swi5: acpitas   11 root     -16    0     0K    12K RUN      0:20  1.03%  1.03% idle   38 root     171   52     0K    12K pgzero   0:04  0.00%  0.00% pagezero  PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND   21 root     -68 -187     0K    12K *Giant   8:05 48.78% 48.78% irq11: dc0 ac    7 root     -84    0     0K    12K actask   2:14 11.67% 11.67% acpi_task2    6 root     -84    0     0K    12K actask   2:13 11.28% 11.28% acpi_task1    5 root     -84    0     0K    12K actask   2:13 10.84% 10.84% acpi_task0   19 root     -28 -147     0K    12K WAIT     0:11 10.40% 10.40% swi5: acpitas   11 root     -16    0     0K    12K RUN      0:20  1.03%  1.03% idle   38 root     171   52     0K    12K pgzero   0:04  0.00%  0.00% pagezero  PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND   21 root     -68 -187     0K    12K *Giant   8:06 49.12% 49.12% irq11: dc0 ac    7 root     -84    0     0K    12K actask   2:14 11.43% 11.43% acpi_task2    6 root     -84    0     0K    12K actask   2:13 10.99% 10.99% acpi_task1    5 root     -84    0     0K    12K actask   2:13 10.89% 10.89% acpi_task0   19 root     -28 -147     0K    12K WAIT     0:11 10.40% 10.40% swi5: acpitas   11 root     -16    0     0K    12K RUN      0:20  1.03%  1.03% idle   38 root     171   52     0K    12K pgzero   0:04  0.00%  0.00% pagezero  PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND   21 root     -68 -187     0K    12K *Giant   8:07 49.27% 49.27% irq11: dc0 ac    7 root     -84    0     0K    12K actask   2:14 11.23% 11.23% acpi_task2    6 root     -84    0     0K    12K actask   2:14 10.84% 10.84% acpi_task1    5 root     -84    0     0K    12K actask   2:14 10.79% 10.79% acpi_task0   19 root     -28 -147     0K    12K WAIT     0:11 10.79% 10.79% swi5: acpitas   11 root     -16    0     0K    12K RUN      0:20  1.03%  1.03% idle   38 root     171   52     0K    12K pgzero   0:04  0.00%  0.00% pagezero 

(hopefully the fourm didn't murder that pretty output )

I did not get to try glgears yet. card is a (MSI) NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti4200 ... I've already DLed NVIDIA's FreeBSD drivers but have not got around to installing yet (docs say I'll have to recompile kernel, haven't got that far yet (want to get connected to net first and (possibly) cvsup before hand.. assuming it is safe at the time.) )




Thank you for your help Interim!

p.s. Sidenote: Heh they way I type you'd think I'd like lisp, all those nested Prens and such.
*edit: cursed be the angle brackets for html doth eat them! ... BAH!*

[edited by - FeralOfFiretop on August 12, 2003 11:04:10 PM]

No worries.

Looking at your top outputs, I think ACPI is interfering with your system. I haven''t played with it much, personally have never seen this before, but its eating up most of your resources. There is probably a bug somewhere with it.

I bet the irq process is from that as well.

For kicks and giggles, try ''acpiconf -d'' to disable acpi. I don''t think that will work, you might have to add a line to your /etc/device.hints file.

Edit /etc/device.hints and add the line ''hint.acpi.0.disabled=1''. Probably easiest to reboot after this, ''shutdown -r now''.

Check your top or ps again after the reboot to see if its still eating your CPU (betting it won''t). If this isn''t a laptop, then you probably don''t need it (just no sleep mode), but you can then look for fixes to ACPI (must be a known bug) or you can switch to APM.

Int.

Ahhh!
Yup, looks like that evil ACPI was behind it all!
‘acpiconf –d’ did work, at least somewhat… it took out the irq11 one and gave me 70% or so idle time, as I recall. So I went about disabling acpi! (as this is a desktop system I’ve really no care about acpi in the first place, and certainly not if it is giving me trouble ) By the by this is a athalon 900 768meg ram, in case anyone was curious

I found that ‘/etc/device.hints’ didn’t exist, so I created it and after a ‘shutdown -r now’ found that nothing had changed... So after some reading/googling I was pointed to ‘/boot/device.hints’ added ‘hint.acpi.0.disabled="1"’ at the bottom and after another shutdown no trace of acpi now and 99.8-100% idle time! Yay!

So, now that speed is where I was expecting (fast!) I’ve got to figure out how to get kde ||&& gnome working right! (gnome doesn’t seem to have bonobo... and kde seems fine for root but normal login won’t load the file manager. (‘mutex error - device busy’ as I recall) Really not sure there but haven’t looked very well yet so hopefully I’ll trip over something

How does one go about setting permissions for a mount point? My /windows mount is set as ‘rw’ in the options column in ‘/etc/fstab/’ but only root has write permissions. ... ‘man mount’(?) mentioned that the mount has the permissions of the current location or something like that, i.e. ‘/’ … I’d like all of wheel (group: seems easiest?) to have rwx access.

Fwiw I don’t seem to have much installed yet... no glgears for instance.

Woot, getting close to being usable now!

Oops, my bad. Sorry about that, it is /boot/device.hints. I guess I was on crack this morning. Sorry to get you on a side trip.

As for the mount point, you can just make sure its set for root:wheel = ''chown root:wheel /windows''. Then make sure its read-write for the owner and group. You can do this with ''chmod ug+rwx /windows'' or ''chmod 774 /windows''.

You should probably rerun /stand/sysinstall and reselect all the X window components for KDE and GNOME before you spend too much energy on that one.

Int.

(: Not a problem at all, keeps me on my toes!

/windows (which is a mount_msdosfs, spcifically fat32 dos partition) is owned by root:wheel, but it does not want to allow write access to the group, even ''chmod g+w /windows'' did nothing .. assuming I understand it (chmod) right that is `make /windows writable by group`... so that should have done what I wanted. still drwxr-r- though (from memory); normal (wheel group) login gets permission denied, of course. I did not try ''chmod 774 /windows'', but that is the same exact thing as ''chmod ug+rwx /windows'', assuming I understand it right

I ran `/stand/sysinstall` (didn''t know it was there! been just sysinstall, from /usr/sbin/) and discoverd bonobo (among a few other things) were um... how do we say this... not checked. Heh. So, installed all the gnome things and it croked on hostname, of which I''m looking up now, I beleve I just need to put ''hostname 127.0.0.1'' in `/etc/rc.conf` (I think `man hostname` said).

I don''t understand what you mean by `...reselect all the X window components for KDE and GNOME...` ... as in uninstall/reinstall?

Thank you bunches!
p.s. 600-700kps off the cdrom now, lol.

Try ''umount /windows'', then do ''chmod ug+rw''. Then ''mount /windows'' (since you have it defined in your /etc/fstab.

Yes, I don''t the install in front of me. But there is a selection to install the X components. It''ll reinstall/install those things you missed.

Yeah, you can just add your hostname to your /etc/hosts to solve that X problem. It should still load though. Add a new line (leave localhost) that uses your assigned IP.

Int.

Neato...
I set `hostname="localhost"` in `/etc/rc.conf` and as `/etc/hosts` already contained entries for localhost it would seem that is all I need do; at least so far as gnome2 is concerned. I’m not sure at all if I’ll have to set that differently once I get connected to the `net with it.

Anyway Gnome2 seems to work now... installing bonobo and setting hostname seems to have done the trick there. KDE’s file manager now works with my normal name as well... turns out it was keeling because (or at least something to do with) sound preview and given that I have no sound (SoundBlaster Live! Value, which as I understand it has experimental drivers at this stage... as such I’ll worry about sound later). Anyway went to the control panel thing and turned off all the preview options (file was the problematic one) and was able to load konqueror and turned off the sound preview and all seems well.

Sooooo, now on to figuring out how to properly configure/run kde/gnome. Also in the queue is conecting to the net! (I never had any luck connecting linux to the net so if I’m lucky I’ll be able to post from konqueror at some point in the future )

So far so good! (:
p.s. ahh that is reasonable, change permissions when it(/windows) is not mounted! How reasonable! (: (:
p.p.s I don''t think I would have gotten this far without your help Interim, thank you VERY very much!

No worries, little slow at work. Besides, you need to pass on the help at least once in return as you settle in.

What you did will fix it, but I would set your hostname to something you like. Then go to /etc/hosts and add a line with your new hostname and your ip address.

So say you have a private network running 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0 and you''re on 192.168.1.2. Add ''192.168.1.2 ''. Gnome and KDE will find your hostname from there.

If you start using your machine as an FTP server, or web server, you''ll probably have to populate your hosts file with all your local network machines to speed up connections (you''ll see initial logins to FTP are slow, since I believe TCP Wrappers will try to resolve the IP a few times for logging). You''ll also need to change the BSD default, which is to try DNS, then hosts file. Otherwise you''ll still get the long delays. All you have to do there is copy /usr/compat/linux/etc/nsswitch.conf /etc/nsswitch.conf. You might also want to edit that file and change the line ''hosts: files nisplus nis dns'' to ''hosts: files dns nisplus nis''.

I never tried getting the SoundBlaster Live! running, but I know it works. I bet a simple google search with FreeBSD 5.0 and SoundBlaster Live! will return steps on how to do it.

You should stop by
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/index.html

That is probably one of the better overviews of running BSD (and even Linux for some topics). It also covers common things you''ve seen and want to do (setup PPP for dialup, or set up firewall services). That combined with man pages will get you upto speed.

Its time consuming at first, but once you learn a good set of the Unix tools and design, you''ll be able to move along and get productive. BSD is nice in the sense they have several elements that centralize management. Sysctl, /boot/device.hints, /etc/rc.conf. With RedHat, I used to alter boot scripts, scrounge around to find where they set variables or what files they want to read for settings. When I first used BSD I was pleasantly surprised to find all the common system administration tasks centralized. Once you learn those tasks and how to do them effectively, you''ll find its much more consistent than some Linux distribution.

You might also want to look into making sure Linux compatibility is running on your system, also covered in the Handbook in detail. It does a great job of running Linux binaries with little to no issues or overhead. I run my Matrox video Linux drivers on FreeBSD using Linux compat. This may help with commerical software not compiled on BSD you still want to use from Linux.

G''luck with the rest of it. Hope you enjoy the change =)

Int.