[luau] Fedora Core 1 seems slow

[Warren Togami]

Thomas Hackett wrote:
> Hi Guys,
> 
> I've just finished installing Fedora Core 1 and to be honest, I'm kind 
> of disappointed.  It seems really slow compared to Debian.  I'm using it 
> on a PIII 450 MHz IBM ThinkPad 390x with 160 MB or ram.  I used to run 
> Debian unstable and that worked fine.
> 
> I'm wondering if there's something I need to do to speed up Fedora.  I 
> think I did a pretty standard install.  Could I have put on too much?  
> Are there things I need to shutdown?  Would updating to the latest 
> versions of packages help things?
> 
> - Tom Hackett
> 

One thing that really helps desktop application speed is waiting for the 
automatic prelink to happen.  prelink goes through all of your binaries 
and makes it so they launch and execute much faster.  I think it happens 
automatically once per day in cron, but you can force it as root with:

/etc/cron.daily/prelink

As far as shutting down services, most of the services are disabled by 
default when you install FC, however there still may be some extraneous 
stuff.  Use this command to list everything that is enabled in runlevel 
3 (text only mode):

chkconfig --list |grep 3:on

Similarly use this to list everything that is enabled in graphical mode:

chkconfig --list |grep 5:on

Then use this command to turn disable services from automatically starting:

chkconfig SERVICENAME off

You can use this command to turn off a service immediately:

service SERVICENAME stop

Be careful about not turning off critical system services...

Other than this, the only recommendation I can make is removing the 
"magicdev" package.  It uses about 1MB of memory while logged into GNOME 
and doesn't do much useful.  Sometimes it actually conflicts with what 
you are doing, especially CD burning.

Where do you see slowness?  Are you talking about desktop stuff?  Try it 
again after prelink and let me know how it goes.

Warren