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Alan Mead wrote: >I am preparing a used computer for my mother. I installed win98 SE and then >Enigma. Of course, I'm rooting for Linux but I notice that when I boot >Windows it flies while Gnome is quite slow. Well, you're sorta comparing new oranges to old apples there. Both KDE and Gnome's speed seem to be on a par with the latest Microsoft GUIs, but all are considerably slower than Win9x. You should investigate a lighter window manager. I'm an Enlightenment devotee; it's truly beautiful, and is faster than the heavyweight desktop environments, but takes more time to learn to configure and use, and can be equally slow if you go too heavy on the effects. FVWM is unbeatable for speed, but not particularly easy for a Winbie to get used to. I haven't tried XFce, but from what I've seen and heard, it looks like a good combination of useability and light weight. Any of these can be made intuitive, though, if you take the time to configure an environment that's appropriate for the user. I use Enlightenment in my public kiosk build, which traps the user in Mozilla, and no one even knows they're not using Windows. Just about anything is possible. > KDE seems to run faster (also >the little "hourglass" animations are psychologically pleasing). Is it >possible to make Gnome faster? Nice thing about KDE is that you can configure lots of its display aspects that affect speed. Same may be true of Gnome, I just haven't spent as much time with it. Pay attention to the options KDE shows you when you first fire it up for a new user. >(e.g., the distinction between X, Gnome, and >Sawmill is not clear to me). Briefly and perhaps not perfectly accurate, but close enough for rock and roll: X is basically the video driver. Sawmill is the window manager, which controls where windows go and how you interact with them. Gnome is the "desktop environment" -- the eye candy, toolbars, menus, and other things that enhance useability and accessibility. In X, unlike in Microsoft Windows, these components are mostly interchangeable, but some packages (such as Enlightenment) strive to do more than one of the above. That, I'm sure, is why Enlightenment was dropped from the default Gnome installation -- it was trying to be too much of an "environment", and was fighting with Gnome for control over things like the background settings. Sawmill is just a polite "yes man" that only does one thing: manages windows. >The machine has two WD drives, a 20GB primary and a 4GB slave, both on ide0 >controller. I don't know how fast the drives are. The machine has 96 MB >RAM and is a PII/266. I installed Linux with 250 MB of swap, a boot >partition, and another big root partition--all on the big drive. The extra >disk will be a shared vfat disk. The quickest way to speed everything up is to add memory, and it's dirt cheap right now. Load it up. Good luck ... -d - -- David Talkington PGP key: http://www.prairienet.org/~dtalk/0xCA4C11AD.pgp -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 6.5.8 Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.75-6 iQA/AwUBPCJOXr9BpdPKTBGtEQKW5wCfVqIfX2wPhiCLjrNCASfkkXPJrlYAn3xZ N6wb5/AIbHpNvNbsXg06Jq4B =tSt4 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Redhat-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
