[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Debian on Slow laptops. What setup is best?



On Tue, Jun 21, 2005 at 06:13:35PM +0200, Benedek Frank wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I am seeking info from other people who has slow laptops, or just know how to 
> save memory and CPU usage on a Debian system.
> 
> I am an owner of a Sony Vaio PCG-C1VRX/K laptop, that has a Transmeta Crusoe 
> 600MHZ CPU, which is very slow in nowdays, but I refuse to change it as I 
> love it. I have a Centrino DELL laptop, but I dont use that much, as I am 
> just inlove with this thing, however I need it to be faster.
> 
> I have a 2.6.11 kernel. I saw a major slowdown from when I upgraded to 2.6 
> kernel, from 2.4. Even disabling Discover, I now only have Hotplug, but boot 
> time is still around 3 minutes. That is to console. From there, I booted KDM 
> and KDE, and my full boot time was around 4 minutes and a little.
> 
> I looked into smaller window managers, but finally I am using now XFCE, which 
> is ultra fast compare to KDE. I dont use KDM now anymore, I rather log in 
> with console and do a "startx" from there.
> 
> However, still my boot time is unacceptable. Not even speaking when I try to 
> open Kmail or Openoffice, and Firefox. They take a loooooooong time to boot 
> up.
> 
> Anybody has any more suggestions, how to make a speedy but usable Debian 
> laptop?

Running a lightweight window manager is absolutely a good idea if you
want performance.  I usually like to use openbox, though if you're happy
with XFCE then by all means keep using it.

How married are you to kmail?  A console MUA would help in that case; I
like mutt but there are others.  Some people say they can browse the web
just fine with console browsers most of the time (like the various
lynx/links/elinks programs .  . . I don't do that so I can't really
say).  

How do you use openoffice?  You may be able to avoid using that as well.
There are utilities for converting word documents and the like to other
formats; maybe those would serve.  Also, if you need to write papers or
other documents, there's always LaTeX.  Finally, it's not just your
machine; openoffice is just slow.

Did you compile your own kernel?  If you do so you can often remove
things you don't need and the boot time will improve, I believe.  This
will likely take some research.

You can also turn off services you don't use by editing the contents of
/etc/init.d/.  This will likely improve your boot time quite a bit
depending on what you can do without.  Could someone explain this
further?  I don't really know what I'm doing in this area.

Is your laptop's suspend/resume working?  If so, you can save boot time
by not shutting down.  :-]

Max out your memory if you can.  That improves performance too.

These are most of the things I did with my Dell Latitude, which was a
mighty 333 MHz.  I used it for "everything" until last year when the
screen finally crapped out, and it was certainly more than fast enough.

Hope that helps.

-T



Reply to: