help with speeding up system

ShevY

I currently dual boot XP with a couple of basic distros ive been trying out, but am usually too lazy to boot into.
I'm now stuck on a Pentium 3, and seeing as i only use the same programs all the time (firefox,thunderbird,few media players etc.), is ther some distro i can use to completely cut out everything i dont use. To just have these programs and nothing else, id love things to be a bit faster.
What would be the best distro to use and best way to go about this?

Thanks for any help,

shev.

niallb

What window manager you use is the quickest way to speed things up.
How much RAM do you have?
If you're using KDE because it's the default, stop right now.
There might even be a menu to select Session type in your login screen.
Choose icewm or xfce (or xfce4 if it's there) and you'll
notice a huge speed increase.

Vector linux is a stripped down build of Slackware which is aimed at older hardware,
you might try that as well, but try the window manager switch first - it doesn't require a reinstall.

NiallB

ShevY

thx for the reply,

im gonna reinstall anyway, so i might give that vector linux a try or just use one of the common distros with a minimalist window manager,
384ram btw, any other suggestions?

shev.

nadir

run fluxbox, kill any processes you not using, stop any services you dont need '/etc/init.d/servicename stop', run application with nice -n 15 whatever
or otherwise prioritise processes.
have a swap partition half that of your ram, make sure you are running a 2.6 kernel with

[*] Preemptible Kernel
[*] MTRR (Memory Type Range Register) support

in general setup make sure '[*] Support for paging of anonymous memory' is selected, should be by default.

compile all your programs with the correct flags

cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep flags

for example i have

flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse

because this is a dual p3 is use g++ options like this

-O3 -mcpu=i686 -pipe

so you could also use option like -mmmx -msse to allow direct access to mmx or sse for better stack controll.

I would adive using gentoo so you can just add them as USE flags, rather than have to be pouring over g++ man which is quite big.
anyhow, there is some stuff that might help

slartibardfast

If your after a more responsive desktop, what ever your distro give the ck-patchset a go (http://members.optusnet.com.au/ckolivas/kernel/), a more responsive desktop saves a lot of frustration :-)

Seconding gentoo , for two reasons:
1. Less bloat by default than say fedora. (Saves switching stuff off later)
2. Some packages(e.g. OpenOffice) aren't compatible with specific gcc optimizations, and as gentoo users are prolific tweakers such bad optimizations are quickly blacklisted, which helps maintain stability while getting everything out of a system.

If your very brave build a system with reiser4, it's a cracking filesystem very very fast, although I'm wouldn't use it for my /home, Even if you don't want reiser4, consider reiserfs (with the notail option) over ext3 you won't be disappointed.