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Topic: DSL running slowly, on 486/50 , 20 MB RAM

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Jens

Group: Members
Posts: 6
Joined: May 2005

Posted: May 01 2005,14:12

Hello folks,
I downloaded DSL, which really seems to be a nice distribution. My Laptop (Siemens PCD-4ND) has a SCSI-Cd-ROM attached to the dockingstation - however the BIOS is old and doesn´t allow to boot from CD. So I decided booting via the LOADLIN-Method,which works fine.
However - it´s running relatively slow - is that normal on this specification? Or could I make it running faster? (The partition where DSL is located is FAT16)

Regards
Jens

skaos

Group: Members
Posts: 430
Joined: April 2004

Posted: May 02 2005,11:28

If you already haven't done it, a hard disk install should make it a bit faster: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/talk/node/64

You need to repartition your disk. The following assumes that you don't mind wiping the disk. If you don't have a dos boot diskette, download one from http://www.bootdisk.com/, start ms-dos fdisk, delete all partitions and create a new 60 MB partition. Copy the 50 MB knoppix file to c:\knoppix and boot as you did before, and then follow the instructions in the link above. Create a 32-40 MB swap partition and the rest of free space as a linux partition (you need at least 120 MB).

Jens
Unregistered

Posted: May 02 2005,17:42

Hey skaos,
thanks a lot for your answer. Do you have any idea, of how much it´ll fasten DSL? Because when I said it´s running "relatively slow" I better should have said "it works, but is not really usable at all".

Regards
Jens

skaos

Group: Members
Posts: 430
Joined: April 2004

Posted: May 03 2005,11:10

First I should say something I forgot yesterday: does the scsi CD drive require win/dos driver(s) to operate? If so, make sure that you take backups (and to be doubly sure, make a dos boot diskette with the drivers to see if you can access the drive) - you may end up not beeing able to access the drive after repartitionning the drive.

I don't know how much faster it will be. I'm not quite sure, but my impression is that the live CD uses some of the memory as a ram disk (and as your PC only have 20 MB, this probably is the biggest bottleneck). Secondly, the live CD has to access a slow CD drive and on top of that, it has to decompress whatever it reads from the CD. A quesstimate is that it would be 2-3-4 times faster.

skaos

Group: Members
Posts: 430
Joined: April 2004

Posted: May 04 2005,09:46

You could also take a look at the following thread to get an idea about speed:
http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....;t=5489

4 replies since May 01 2005,14:12

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