Hi all

I got a old computer (for free), its a Athlon Xp1700+ with 256mb ram.

It was really slow with its original windows installation, so i reinstalled it with Windows XP PRO and everything was great it was even faster then i thought it would be. So i also installed Ubuntu 7.10 but its a lot slower, loading and browsing a website takes longer now, and running 2 programs simultaneously is a pain. It probably has something to do with the drivers ubuntu uses for this system.

Does someone know how i would be able to speed up the ubuntu install. (without hardware upgrades

Thanks

I would probably say it's due to drivers,
Your best bet would be to find updated chipset drivers and graphic drivers for it

You could try this instead: http://www.xubuntu.org/

Yea, while Ubuntu usually runs quite nicely, it will benefit from 512mb of ram over 256. Xubuntu is a bit more minimalistic, but you could give it a try. If you want to try to improve performance in regular Ubuntu though, make sure that desktop effects are disabled, as well as any services you're not using.

compiling a custom kernel without the kernel modules you don't need/use would also help out with speed. Then if you could recompile gnome after the kernel, it should be faster and more optimized for the system. It won't be a short process and could potentially take a day, but it would be on the cheaper side.

ar1stotle wrote:

make sure that desktop effects are disabled,

Yes I found this function, it sure helped it seems to response much faster now.

imnuts wrote:

compiling a custom kernel without the kernel modules you don't need/use would also help out with speed. Then if you could recompile gnome after the kernel, it should be faster and more optimized for the system. It won't be a short process and could potentially take a day, but it would be on the cheaper side.

Do you have some more information about this. I wouldn't know where to start.

This site has a good overview for building a kernel on Ubuntu.
http://www.howtoforge.com/kernel_compilation_ubuntu

The toughest part to get used to is choosing what you want from the drivers available (there are a lot of options).

The "lspci" command is great to get a list of what you have to work with, and if you can make sense of the names listed compared to the config menu, "lsmod" will tell you what modules are actually loaded and in use on the system *now* ... but a list of random things off the top of my head to keep in mind:

a) USB Mass Storage devices depend on base SCSI support, but none fo the low level drivers.
b) setting the Timer Frequency (on the processor types page) to the highest and building it as a fully preemptable kernel really kick up responsiveness
c) ALSA > OSS
d) set the processor type to match what you have, and disable generic x86 support (it will only run on that exact family of processor)
e) disable SMP
f) if you *know* you don't have something, disable it (if you're not sure, leave it the default)
g) If you are fairly certain you do have something, set it to built in (except device drivers->Graphics->DRM, it has to be a module for the Nvidia and ATI drivers to function)
h) ...

(winging this off the top of my head makes for fun times ... I'm not near a linux box that I can get to it on at the moment)