On Thu, 17 Jun 2004 07:30:43 -0400, General Schvantzkoph wrote:

> The problem with RH9 isn't any of the obvious things. It's not memory,
> it's not Gnome and it's not the kernel. As I stated earlier I found that
> RH9 was massively slower than RH7.3 or Mandrake 9.2 or MDK 10. My system
> is a 500MHz PIII with 512M of RAM. Gtop showed that there wasn't a memory
> problem. I built my own kernel and it made no difference. I used exactly
> the same kernel on RH7.3 and on RH9.0, the performance of RH7.3 was
> substantially better than RH9.0, my Xemacs launch test showed that 10
> copies of Xemacs launched 4X faster on 7.3 than on 9.0. It's also not
> Gnome, I was using Ximian Gnome on RH7.3 and Mandrake 9.2 and 10.0 both
> use Gnome 2.4. Mandrake 9.2 is even faster than RH7.3 and Mandrake 10.0 is
> faster still.
>
> It's not worth debugging the RH9.0 problem. RH9 is end of life so why
> bother installing it now. Mandrake is easy to install and it's performance
> is excellent, give it a try.

I might give it a try. But what's the deal with MandrakeClub? I'm
certainly not going to join in the near term. How much do I miss out on
by not joining? I'm a little leery about the rpm database being available
only to members. Am I going to have any hassle installing software
because I don't have access to that database?

On Thu, 17 Jun 2004 14:54:37 -0400, Douglas O'Neal wrote:

> Zinn wrote:
>> <snip>
>> Almost everyone who's posted to this thread saying they get good
>> performance on limited hardware with Linux is running something simpler
>> than Gnome, like your IceWM. I've avoided going that route for a variety
>> of reasons. The most important of these is that I'm writing software with
>> a gtk interface and I want to see it run and interact in a Gnome
>> environment.
>
> So how are you planning on doing this on your Win2000 installation?

Well, ultimately it doesn't really matter if it's a Gnome environment or
not, but it is sort of the most natural home for gtk software. It's
also where you live if you want to see what other people are doing and be
in sync with the Gtk/Gnome paradigm. If I were writing Qt software, I'd be
running KDE, though again it's not absolutely necessary. It's actually
just as important to test under Windows of course, because there are
slight differences between the behavior of gtk (not to mention other
libraries) under different platforms, and Windows support might not be as
good as Linux support yet.

On Sat, 19 Jun 2004 02:47:45 -0600, Zinn wrote:

> On Thu, 17 Jun 2004 07:30:43 -0400, General Schvantzkoph wrote:
>
>> The problem with RH9 isn't any of the obvious things. It's not memory,
>> it's not Gnome and it's not the kernel. As I stated earlier I found that
>> RH9 was massively slower than RH7.3 or Mandrake 9.2 or MDK 10. My system
>> is a 500MHz PIII with 512M of RAM. Gtop showed that there wasn't a memory
>> problem. I built my own kernel and it made no difference. I used exactly
>> the same kernel on RH7.3 and on RH9.0, the performance of RH7.3 was
>> substantially better than RH9.0, my Xemacs launch test showed that 10
>> copies of Xemacs launched 4X faster on 7.3 than on 9.0. It's also not
>> Gnome, I was using Ximian Gnome on RH7.3 and Mandrake 9.2 and 10.0 both
>> use Gnome 2.4. Mandrake 9.2 is even faster than RH7.3 and Mandrake 10.0 is
>> faster still.
>>
>> It's not worth debugging the RH9.0 problem. RH9 is end of life so why
>> bother installing it now. Mandrake is easy to install and it's performance
>> is excellent, give it a try.
>
> I might give it a try. But what's the deal with MandrakeClub? I'm
> certainly not going to join in the near term. How much do I miss out on
> by not joining? I'm a little leery about the rpm database being available
> only to members. Am I going to have any hassle installing software
> because I don't have access to that database?

MandrakeClub is just a means of supporting Mandrake. MandrakeClub members
get access to new releases a few weeks earlier than non-club members. They
also get access to the PowerPack version of the distribution which
integrates a handfull of non-GPLed but otherwise free apps and software.
i.e. the Nvidia drivers, Acrobat, Realplayer. If you install the public
version of Mandrake you'll have to download the non-GPL stuff separately.
Most of the RPM databases are available to everyone, the only one that
isn't is the commericial apps database.