Linked by Anand Vaidya on Wed 5th Jan 2005 18:19 UTC
On October 22, 2004, Novell released SUSE Linux Professional 9.2 (abbreviated as SLP9.2 henceforth) targeted at the home user and Linux enthusiast crowd. Since I am already using SUSE 9.1 for my daily work on my IBM laptop, I was quite eager to check out 9.2. SLP9.1 is already a very polished Linux distribution, with tons of software ready to go. So here's a SuSE user's review of 9.2 after several weeks using the new version. Update: Also see some 9.2 screenshots with KDE and Gnome.
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i've bought the retail boxed Professional versions of Suse 9.0, 9.1 and 9.2. .. and i've just been dispappointed with the performance in general. part of this is due to:
http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-linux-e/2004-Oct/0556.html
> Out of the box "time kate" reported 4.5s.
>
> Pre-linking kate cut about 0.5s off this time. (A little
> poking about seemed to show that pre-linking cut 0.5s
> off the loading time of most KDE apps.)
>
> But I also noticed that doing an
> "export LANG=C" before launching kate cut a full second(!)
> off the startup time. (My default LANG on this box is
> en_GB.UTF-8)
>
> A quick analysis of the output from "strace -r konsole" showed
> that indeed, it was taking about 1 second for X11 to
> parse the /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose
> file
...
Thank you very much! With your suggestions it is much faster now. On this
machine kate launch time went from 6.3 down to 4.3. konsole from 5.4 to 3.3.
It is still not as responsive as this kde 2.2.1 I'm using now (Suse 7.3, the
best so far), but it is coming closer.
What am I missing with the LANG =C setting? How to enable it system wide?
One final note: your findings show that performance really seems to have been
forgotten. And the saddest part is some people are blind enough not to
recognize it.
.. and removing the "desktop" kernel parameter starting from version 9.0 can help on older machines and does help things a bit for me (as well as certain on/off combos of acpi, apm and desktop paramter together as suggested by someone at suse on the mailing list)
http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2003/10/pohletz_desktop_90.html
.. since "The "desktop" boot parameter sets ten times shorter time slices (1-31ms) and ten times higher timer interrupt rate (1000/s) than standard. "
http://portal.suse.de/sdb/en/2003/10/90_scheduling.html
.. but even with all those two things--turning off utf8 and removing the desktop parameter--it's still relatively and noticably slower on old machines (PIII 500mhz & 600mhz, 256MB & 512MB ram, 7200 rpm hd) compared to windows 2000, windows xp with antivirus off, freebsd 5.x, and other distros like mepis, mandrake 10.x. (both mandrake 10 and freebsd especially fly here!)