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Why are you wasting your hardware on Windoze?

monsoon

By monsoon
in The Coffee House

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monsoon Gigalopolis

monsoon

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On Ubuntu, you can also install SwiftFox which is an official version of Firefox that has been compiled for specific processors. It is much faster than FireFox and blows away IE. Please don't tell me you are using IE. lol

SwiftFox

You can use Automatix to install it automatically including all commonly used plugins and it migrates all of your bookmarks etc.

swiftfox.jpg

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snoogit Town

snoogit

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I have used linux in the past, but I havent lately. It comes down to what do I use my PC for most? I could see myself moving to it now, because right now I do mostly email and internet use, with some gaming on the side. But once I get myself stable again I'll be going mostly gaming again.

Other then a handful of devs, gaming on linux is almost non existant.

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snoogit Town

snoogit

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See this.

Linux gaming though is a lot like Mac gaming.

It relies mostly on porters who caan take up to a year or more porting a game over to it.

Granted, I get a lot of fun playing games on linux, the games I'm playing now just arent available on linux. (well maybe as a server client they are.)

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runawayjim Metropolis

runawayjim

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On Ubuntu, you can also install SwiftFox which is an official version of Firefox that has been compiled for specific processors. It is much faster than FireFox and blows away IE. Please don't tell me you are using IE. lol

SwiftFox

You can use Automatix to install it automatically including all commonly used plugins and it migrates all of your bookmarks etc.

swiftfox.jpg

hmmm, i'll have to try that. i put ubuntu on my old machine (duron 1 GHz with 384 megs of RAM). firefox on that machine is wicked slow, yet when i had win2k on it, firefox ran like a charm. i don't know if it's because of ubuntu or because of firefox... but i'm gonna try swiftfox on it next time i boot it up (fiancee's computer has taken over that desk in my office for the summer).

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runawayjim Metropolis

runawayjim

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ok, i'm using swiftfox now... it seems a bit better than firefox, but other aspects of the OS are slow. one change i made was completely reinstalling ubuntu because i had done a whole bunch of extra crap to try to get my resolutions working properly, but none of what i did ever worked. i actually found the reason nothing worked and that's the only thing i had to do. so it's now got a fresh install of the latest version.

so short of checking the forums... any suggestions on how to get the speed a bit faster? again, it's a 1 GHz with 384 MB RAM.

one thing to note is that i actually got this machine to print to my shared deskjet 722C, which is connected to my windows machine. now if you know linux printers, you'd know this one is one of those "windows only" type printers that are really difficult to get printing. i was impressed that i'm able to print to it and it's not even connected to this machine. :thumbsup:

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monsoon Gigalopolis

monsoon

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Most likely you can get some extra speed by changing out the default I386 kernel with one specific for your processer. It works especially well if you have an AMD processor. The other is removing services that you don't need. Ubuntu is pretty good about not installing things you don't need, but there are somethings things you can get rid of. Oh and make sure you used one of the native Linux filesystems and stay away from FAT. I use resierFS.

I recommend going to the Ubuntu forums as there are a lot of other tips found there. I have found that in most cases the default ubuntu system is faster than windows on the same system especially after you install all of the required patches, antivirus and other things that keep windows from breaking. But Ubuntu can certainly be easily tweaked for more speed.

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runawayjim Metropolis

runawayjim

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Most likely you can get some extra speed by changing out the default I386 kernel with one specific for your processer. It works especially well if you have an AMD processor. The other is removing services that you don't need. Ubuntu is pretty good about not installing things you don't need, but there are somethings things you can get rid of. Oh and make sure you used one of the native Linux filesystems and stay away from FAT. I use resierFS.

I recommend going to the Ubuntu forums as there are a lot of other tips found there. I have found that in most cases the default ubuntu system is faster than windows on the same system especially after you install all of the required patches, antivirus and other things that keep windows from breaking. But Ubuntu can certainly be easily tweaked for more speed.

is resierFS faster than ext3?

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monsoon Gigalopolis

monsoon

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I have reiserFS installed on one PC and EXT on the other. These machines are roughly equivalent to each other in physical technology, and reiser does seem to be faster for some things. On both filesystems, you can get some more speed if you disable some of the aspects of journaling. (It's still safer than Fat32 or hpfs)

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peaceloveunderstanding Town

peaceloveunderstanding

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Jim, You may want to try another window manager.

Use XFCE if you want a very fast desktop on limited hardware.

Go to the terminal and type in "sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop", accept all of the changes, log out, and then at the login screen change your session to xfce.

GNOME is a bit too bloated for 384 MB RAM. But this is where linux is more powerful, there are many options available for computers of all performance grades.

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runawayjim Metropolis

runawayjim

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Jim, You may want to try another window manager.

Use XFCE if you want a very fast desktop on limited hardware.

Go to the terminal and type in "sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop", accept all of the changes, log out, and then at the login screen change your session to xfce.

GNOME is a bit too bloated for 384 MB RAM. But this is where linux is more powerful, there are many options available for computers of all performance grades.

if xfce is what i'm thinking it is... i want something that's somewhat prettier. how's kde compared to gnome?

i used to have a linux box with X installed and played around with different window managers. i think XFCE was one of htem... i think it was the most stripped down window manager that i toyed with. do you know if there's a nice package for afterstep for ubuntu?

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runawayjim Metropolis

runawayjim

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XFCE has more features that afterstep and looks bettter. You're thinking of probably thinking of FVWM.

This is a screenshot of XFCE.

http://www.xfce.org/images/screenshots/snap_VI.jpg

I use KDE but it's more resource-intensive than GNOME.

yup, i was thinking of FVWM. i installed xubuntu-desktop. looks decent. i'll play around with it when i get home tonight. i used afterstep when i played with debian several years ago. i liked it. i like the looks of gnome better than kde, so i'll probably remove kubuntu-desktop (i installed that as well) since it uses more resources anyways.

i'm gonna play around with a bunch of stuff and see what works best for me.

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runawayjim Metropolis

runawayjim

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That's what's great about Linux. It's like legos.

yeah, i liked it back then, but back then i had to do everything myself and deal with all the stupid configs and crap. i just didn't have the time. now i've got some time and ubuntu makes everything so much easier to deal with, while still allowing you to get into the configs and crap that i used to deal with if you so choose.

i might try to get afterstep going... i liked the sleek looks of it when i used it with debian way back when...

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