New VL User Siesta Key (Small island on Gulf Coast

[phreon]

Hi Folks,

Just jumped into my first LINUX experience. Installed VL Standard on an old HP Pavillian 8575C.
Pentium III, 1.2Ghz with 384 MB mem and 20 GB HD. I am hoping to get as comfortable with LINUX as Windows.

Just installed yesterday and I have these observations (the first couple hours).

>It is easy to wipe out the old Windows 98 when making partitions from the VL Boot Disk. :-)

>The OS looks great and appears to be pretty solid. Comes with enough apps to do most everything a home user would need. I need to understand better how LINUX handles drives and add on hardware. *Mounting* devices seems foriegn right now, I am not sure the OS has found all of the parts of my system, and I am not sure I can easily discover it.

>It is not clear, after setting up the 3 required partitions, which ones are really being used by LINUX for swap, root, and home. It is not clear that they are even set up correctly, except that the install *appears* to work.

>Web browsing using Firefox is as slow as with Windows 95, and one can only run one application at a time without slowing things way too much.

>It is so slow it is unusable for viewing DVD's. That worked OK in Windows 98.

>LINUX found my D-Link DWL-G122 Wireless USB Dongle, (I used lsusb to verify),  but did not have a driver for it, (I guess). I found a discussion about locating my "Module" but the web sites that may have the Module are not written for a newby to understand all of the ins and outs of getting and installing it. I had to install a network card to get hardwired networking.

>I suspect my install is not solid since I am not seeing better performance over Windows 98 on this machine. I again suspect that my partitions are not set up correctly. I made a partition with 256 meg, one with 750 meg, and one with 4 gig. Not sure how to "tell" LINUX which one to use for swap, root, and home.

At any rate I will bang on this awhile to see if I can get this machine to sing before I add LINUX to my Sony Vaio P4 2.8Mhz 1GB XP machine or my other XP laptops.

I will keep you posted.

P

[lagagnon]

>The OS looks great and appears to be pretty solid. Comes with enough apps to do most everything a home user would need. I need to understand better how LINUX handles drives and add on hardware. *Mounting* devices seems foriegn right now, I am not sure the OS has found all of the parts of my system, and I am not sure I can easily discover it.

If you installed VL5.9 anything you insert to a USB port should be automatically mounted for you.

>It is not clear, after setting up the 3 required partitions, which ones are really being used by LINUX for swap, root, and home. It is not clear that they are even set up correctly, except that the install *appears* to work.

Open a terminal and type "df-h" and "free". You should see the three partitions there.

>Web browsing using Firefox is as slow as with Windows 95, and one can only run one application at a time without slowing things way too much.

I find that hard to believe. I have run VL5.9 on machines such as P300's with same RAM as yours and the browser was quite snappy. Please show us the output of the following commands while you are experiencing slow Firefox:

ps aux
free

>It is so slow it is unusable for viewing DVD's. That worked OK in Windows 98.

As above, you must have a problem. This is not normal on a P1200

>I suspect my install is not solid since I am not seeing better performance over Windows 98 on this machine. I again suspect that my partitions are not set up correctly. I made a partition with 256 meg, one with 750 meg, and one with 4 gig. Not sure how to "tell" LINUX which one to use for swap, root, and home.

A NO WONDER! I think that is your problem. You probably have root on the 4 GIG but your home partition is way too small and the system is unable to create temporary files in /home for running   videos and browser. That would be the reason for all your problems above. Show us the output of "df -h" again.

I'll let someone else help you with the wireless problem.

[phreon]

Woa, you gys are fast.

Ok I did as instructed ... the reults:

You are working as root
Frequently used programs:
Configuration  : vasm
Package manager: slapt-get, pkg
Network tools  : ifconfig, host, ping, nmap, iptables
File manager   : mc (press F2 for useful menu)
Editor         : mcedit, nano, vi
Multimedia     : alsamixer, play
vector:/~
root:# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda6             3.7G  3.1G  400M  89% /
tmpfs                 187M     0  187M   0% /dev/shm
vector:/~
root:# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        381124     190076     191048          0       7936     122276
-/+ buffers/cache:      59864     321260
Swap:            0          0          0
vector:/~
root:# ps -aux
Warning: bad ps syntax, perhaps a bogus '-'? See http://procps.sf.net/faq.html
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root         1  0.4  0.0    772   292 ?        Ss   13:01   0:01 init [4] 
root         2  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   13:01   0:00 [kthreadd]
root         3  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   13:01   0:00 [migration/0]
root         4  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        SN   13:01   0:00 [ksoftirqd/0]
root         5  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   13:01   0:00 [events/0]
root         6  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   13:01   0:00 [khelper]
root        87  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   13:01   0:00 [kblockd/0]
root        88  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   13:01   0:00 [kacpid]
root        89  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   13:01   0:00 [kacpi_notify]
root       156  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   13:01   0:00 [tifm]
root       157  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   13:01   0:00 [ata/0]
root       158  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   13:01   0:00 [ata_aux]
root       159  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   13:01   0:00 [ksuspend_usbd]
root       162  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   13:01   0:00 [khubd]
root       164  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   13:01   0:00 [kseriod]
root       181  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    13:01   0:00 [pdflush]
root       182  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S    13:01   0:00 [pdflush]
root       183  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   13:01   0:00 [kswapd0]
root       184  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   13:01   0:00 [aio/0]
root       185  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   13:01   0:00 [jfsIO]
root       186  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   13:01   0:00 [jfsCommit]
root       187  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   13:01   0:00 [jfsSync]
root       188  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   13:01   0:00 [xfslogd/0]
root       189  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   13:01   0:00 [xfsdatad/0]
root       991  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   13:01   0:00 [kpsmoused]
root       998  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   13:01   0:00 [kmmcd]
root      1015  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   13:01   0:00 [kjournald]
root      1092  0.2  0.3   2504  1204 ?        S<s  13:01   0:00 /sbin/udevd --daemon
root      2250  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S<   13:01   0:00 [kgameportd]
root      2645  0.0  0.1   1708   568 ?        Ss   13:01   0:00 /usr/sbin/syslogd
root      2648  0.0  0.1   1664   408 ?        Ss   13:01   0:00 /usr/sbin/klogd -c 3 -x
root      2759  0.0  0.1   1660   512 ?        Ss   13:02   0:00 /usr/sbin/acpid
81        2947  0.0  0.2   2268   784 ?        Ss   13:02   0:00 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --sy
root      3295  0.0  0.1   1864   664 ?        S    13:02   0:00 /usr/sbin/crond
root      3304  0.0  0.5   5996  1940 ?        Ss   13:02   0:00 /usr/sbin/cupsd
root      3320  0.0  0.2   3120   852 ?        Ss   13:02   0:00 /usr/bin/kdm -nodaemon
root      3368  0.0  0.1   1652   444 tty1     Ss+  13:02   0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty1
root      3369  0.0  0.1   1648   448 tty2     Ss+  13:02   0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty2
root      3378  0.0  0.1   1652   452 tty3     Ss+  13:02   0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty3
root      3387  0.0  0.1   1652   452 tty4     Ss+  13:02   0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty4
root      3396  0.0  0.1   1648   448 tty5     Ss+  13:02   0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty5
root      3405  0.0  0.1   1652   444 tty6     Ss+  13:02   0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty6
root      3419  2.5  4.7  25288 18272 tty7     Ss+  13:02   0:06 /usr/bin/X :0 vt7 -auth /
root      3422  0.0  0.3   3420  1268 ?        S    13:02   0:00 -:0                   
root      3443  0.0  0.3   2684  1324 ?        Ss   13:02   0:00 /bin/sh /etc/xfce/xdg/xfc
root      3467  0.0  0.1   3460   588 ?        Ss   13:02   0:00 /usr/bin/ssh-agent -s
root      3472  0.0  0.1   2860   728 ?        S    13:02   0:00 /usr/bin/dbus-launch --sh
root      3473  0.0  0.2   2264   796 ?        Ss   13:02   0:00 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --fo
root      3475  0.4  1.9  13732  7424 ?        S    13:02   0:01 /usr/bin/xfce4-session
root      3478  0.2  1.4  14920  5492 ?        Ss   13:02   0:00 xfce-mcs-manager
root      3480  0.2  2.2  15484  8716 ?        S    13:02   0:00 xfwm4
root      3482  0.7  2.7  17136 10296 ?        S    13:02   0:01 xfce4-panel
root      3484  0.0  1.1  12640  4560 ?        S    13:02   0:00 Thunar --daemon
root      3486  0.0  0.3   2516  1180 ?        S    13:02   0:00 /usr/libexec/gam_server
root      3488  0.7  3.0  52688 11716 ?        S    13:02   0:01 xfdesktop
root      3489  0.3  2.0  15112  7672 ?        S    13:02   0:00 /usr/libexec/xfce4/panel-
root      3494  0.1  1.5  13584  5936 ?        S    13:02   0:00 /usr/libexec/xfce4/panel-
root      3495  0.3  2.6  17776 10040 ?        S    13:02   0:00 /usr/libexec/xfce4/panel-
root      3526  2.9  2.9  19060 11372 ?        Ss   13:06   0:00 terminal
root      3527  0.0  0.1   2460   748 ?        S    13:06   0:00 gnome-pty-helper
root      3528  0.2  0.4   3016  1688 pts/0    Ss   13:06   0:00 bash
root      3540  0.0  0.2   2508   944 pts/0    R+   13:06   0:00 ps -aux
vector:/~
root:# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        381124     190332     190792          0       7944     122276
-/+ buffers/cache:      60112     321012
Swap:            0          0          0
vector:/~

*********************************

So it appears I need to expand my partitions ?

Thanks
P

[phreon]

hi again,
As  far as the wireless dongle on USB, it does know its there and that is a wireless dongle, it just does not seem to have a driver to make it work as a wireless dongle.

Thanks
P

[newt]

You have two other threads that deal with hardware issues.  The problem with having too many threads about the same general issues is that the information becomes fragmented and hard to interpret.  I would suggest you leave this thread as an 'introduction of yourself' thread and use the others for hardware issues.  It may be worth combining the other two into a single thread where all helpful information can be aggregated.

BTW, good to have you and hope you enjoy VL!

[phreon]

Thanks for the heads up Newtor.
P