On Tue, Jun 21, 2005 at 06:13:35PM +0200, Benedek Frank wrote: > Hi > > I am seeking info from other people who has slow laptops, or just know how to > save memory and CPU usage on a Debian system. > > I am an owner of a Sony Vaio PCG-C1VRX/K laptop, that has a Transmeta Crusoe > 600MHZ CPU, which is very slow in nowdays, but I refuse to change it as I > love it. I have a Centrino DELL laptop, but I dont use that much, as I am > just inlove with this thing, however I need it to be faster. > > I have a 2.6.11 kernel. I saw a major slowdown from when I upgraded to 2.6 > kernel, from 2.4. Even disabling Discover, I now only have Hotplug, but boot > time is still around 3 minutes. That is to console. From there, I booted KDM > and KDE, and my full boot time was around 4 minutes and a little. > > I looked into smaller window managers, but finally I am using now XFCE, which > is ultra fast compare to KDE. I dont use KDM now anymore, I rather log in > with console and do a "startx" from there. > > However, still my boot time is unacceptable. Not even speaking when I try to > open Kmail or Openoffice, and Firefox. They take a loooooooong time to boot > up. > > Anybody has any more suggestions, how to make a speedy but usable Debian > laptop?
How much memory does your laptop have? I have a PIII/600 MHz (probably a bit better than the Crusoe) with 192 MiB of RAM. It is perfectly usable for day-to-day browsing. Only OOo takes some noticeable time to start up and I have to restart Firefox from time to time to lower it's memory usage. What I've done is: * I compiled my own kernel. One benefit is, it tries to load much less modules than the debian's kernel. I only compiled modules I know I will need * I took a hard look on /etc/rc2.d/ to see what is being started during boot. Right now, it looks like this: $ ls -1 /etc/rc2.d/ K11anacron S10sysklogd S11klogd S14ppp S18portmap S20alsa S20apmd S20cpudyn S20dbus-1 S20exim4 S20inetd S20makedev S20pcmcia S20smartmontools S20ssh S20wpasupplicant S20xfs-xtt S21nfs-common S25bluez-utils S89anacron S89atd S89cron S99rmnologin S99stop-bootlogd Depending on what you need or not you could further drop ppp (I actually wonder, why it is there :), portmap, alsa, cpudyn, dbus-1, inetd, pcmcia, ssh, wpasupplicant, nfs-common, bluez-utils. If you feel adventurous, you can also try to drop a few scripts from /etc/rcS.d/. * I have dma and similar stuff turned on during boot: $ cat /etc/rc.boot/hdd-tune.sh #!/bin/bash /sbin/hdparm -X66 -d1 -u1 -m16 -c3 /dev/hda (don't copy this blindly, make sure your drive supports this). * to lower memory usage a bit, I only start 2 virtual consoles (on Alt-F1 and Alt-F2) (see /etc/inittab) * my APM (i.e. BIOS) managed suspend-to-ram works, so I usually suspend and resume instead of shutting down and booting again. * theoretically, you could look into a different init system, which starts services in parallel (taking dependencies into account). HTH, j. -- ______________________________________________________________________________ "We did a risk management review. We concluded that there was no risk of any management." -- Dilbert :wq
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