Ubuntu is very heavy on my (not too old) laptop . :(

[darwish]

Hi Everybody. Please don't consider this a flame on Ubuntu. I love it and I hope the best for it. I am a Debian and Linux from scratch user for a year now. After all the good talk about Ubuntu on the net, I decided to install it and be a Ubuntu developer if I liked it.

Well, It seems a huge work from the community, I really loved it.

I have a Dell D505 laptop with a:
* Pentium-M 1.5 GHz, 1MB L2 cache
* 512MB 333MHz Ram
* 1.5 GB swap space
* Integrated 64Mb i810 video card

As you see it's not too old. I think Ubuntu should work with a good speed on it as LFS, Debian and XP do. But really Gnome shipped with Ubuntu is bloated. Here's the results:

* Nautilus takes about a second to view any folder, even if the folder has files with no thumbnails.
* when moving any window above the desktop icons, They got erased and redrawn after a while.
* Any program even a small game like Nibbles takes about 2 seconds to load !
* Gnome menues takes a while to load icons when viewing the menu the first time
* Rythimbox and totem takes about 3 seconds to begin playing a song.
* Moving any big window above a smaller window erase the small window (becomes totally white) for a while
* Moving a window quickly makes it move in pieces. (moving it slowly activate the new metacity option of tilting the lower part of the window a little as XGL do)

As you can see, The overall speed of the system is very low. Comparing above results with the latest Debian Stable (Gnome 2.6) and LFS (Gnome 2.14) I use.

* Nautilus takes no-time to view any folder even if the folder has a lot of pics and videos (displaying thumbnails).
* Most of other programs opens in no-time except OpenOffice as all the community know.

I even tried to disable displaying pics/videos thumbnails, disabling location bar and the "trackerd" daemon in Ubuntu's Nautilus. But it's still bloated.

To be fair, I also tried Ubuntu 6.06 on a new friend's laptop.
It's a Lenovo 3000 N100 with Intel Duo and 512 Ram. I was very surprised!, It has even been much slower than my old laptop and Nautilus takes a long long time to view folders. Even gedit takes time to open !.

anyway, Iam tryin to track the problem and fix it if I can. (The Open Source way ). I thought it's a problem in the i810 Xserver module but direct rendering is working fine with 700 Fps in glgears!.

Bottomline: Ubuntu is too sexy and easy but it's much heavier than other distros (I know it's much better than them) and even heavier than XP.

Love u all.
-----------------
Edit:
Strangely Enough, I've found that Xorg uses the vesa instead of the i810 module. Using the i810 module, All the bad graphical effects mentioned above disappeared.

cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup
sudo sed -i 's/vesa/i810/g' /etc/X11/xorg.conf

[MetalMusicAddict]

Thats too bad sir. Im running Dapper on:

• Dell inspiron 2200
• Celeron 1.4
• 768megs RAM
• no swap
• Integrated 64meg (maybe 32) i810 video card

Very base model. $600 and honestly it runs fine. Ive turned off alot of unneeded services also. Maybe try this?

Ive recently fell in love with Xubuntu though and I think Im gonna put it on the laptop. Might be an option for you? Comming from LFS though every binary distro might seem slow.

[K.Mandla]

I second that. Xubuntu is the only way to go. I run it on a 1.7Ghz 1Gb machine and a 750Mhz 512Mb machine, and have no problems whatsoever. I save Gnome for the 2Ghz+ machines.

[daniel of sarnia]

I have a dell D500, slower then you're laptop buy a bit. I really have not had any of kind of truble with it. I use KDE through, however I had gnome on it with xgl too. So I really don't think it's a ubuntu problem.

[daniel of sarnia]

forgot to say that in contrast, it runs faster then windows XP did on my laptop. I did put 700 MB of swap on it. It only has 256 MB of ram, 64 of it is shared with video and it's only a 1.3 Ghz cpu.

[kop316]

That is really strange.
I have a 1.3 Ghz Celeron processor, 256 mb RAM, 9200 radeon PCI (yes only PCI) card, and 2 GB swap, and Ubuntu flys on it, even when I have 5 gdesklets running. The only time it is slow is when I run Limewire (I think the Java is the issue).
Maybe the reason I think it's fast is because all I have for comparision is when I used to run XP on this (now there was a bloated nightmare).

[djsroknrol]

I'm sorry for rehashing this, but I just posted on another sub forum that I just put Dapper on my T21 Thinkpad (was running Breezy just fine). It's an 800Mhz 128 MB Ram and it's not running that bad...and everything worked OOTB, unlike Breezy, where my Eth0 needed tweaking because of the 3com ethernet adapter.In fact, I'm using it now....Dapper continues to suprise me...

[jnev]

try KDE. I'm running kubuntu on a 366mhz pentium 2 with 256mb ram, and it runs just fine. I tried xubuntu and it was faster (not by much though), but I didn't like xfce. on boot kde only uses 52mb of ram (!).

[LostInSwiss]

I'm sorry for rehashing this, but I just posted on another sub forum that I just put Dapper on my T21 Thinkpad (was running Breezy just fine). It's an 800Mhz 128 MB Ram and it's not running that bad...and everything worked OOTB, unlike Breezy, where my Eth0 needed tweaking because of the 3com ethernet adapter.In fact, I'm using it now....Dapper continues to suprise me...

I am also using ThinkPad T21 (same specs). But I have exactly the problems described by the thread owner . If anyone figures this out please say. Nice to hear suggestions about other distributions but don’t people always say how Linux is great because you don’t have to keep re-installing like with windows?

[prizrak]

Try looking at your system monitor, there is a bug that makes gnome-cups-icon take up 100% of the CPU you might be experiencing that. I am not entirely sure how to turn it off as it restarts but if you make a topic on the forum someone should be able to help you.