Linispire 5.0 and sub300 computers...
A friend of mine purchased a computer from sub300.com, and asked me to set it up. It came with Linspire 5.0 preinstalled.
The computer is a nice little 1.7GHz box with 512MB, a DVD/CDRW, mouse, keyboard, and inexpensive sound card and speaker set. It did not include a monitor, which I brought with me. It is quiet.
Linspire is SLOW. REALLY SLOW. When Linspire finally brought up a desktop I found my self running as root WITHOUT A PASSWORD! I also noticed that the sound card wasn't configured, and using alsaconf didn't help. My friend had a DSL internet connection, which Lispire connected to via DHCP on eth0. I reset it using PPPoE and the correct account info. Thunderbird crashed on almost every webpage. KMail brought down the email but would not display the messages until a closed/reopend the session. The CNR app pulsed continously in the system try, constantly trying to connect to Linspires repository/update website, even though no account was created. After disabling it I had to restart the session to get the icon to leave the system try. LOTS of eye candy. Did I mention that there was LOTS of eye candy? The default icons were so nodescript one had to hover the mouse over them to show the tip ballon in order to learn their purpose. Linspire 5.0 is so poor that were it my first attempt at running Linux I'd quit and return to Windows.
I set up a secure user account for her to run in, and told her I'd be back with MEPIS 6.0b3 later next week.
mepis alpha 2 is very fast.
mepis alpha 2 is very fast. I'm still using it now. If the final release is this fast it will be everything I want from a linux distro. I stopped using windows with the alpha 2 release because it boots quicker than windows & all the included apps except for omission of totem which I installed, give me everything I need.
xandros and linspire
xandros and linspire are the same in that respect. I had xandros 2 as my first linux os and it took ages to boot up. whilst i did like xandros for it's little aspects like the xandros networks and the like. it was a pain in the arse in all other aspects.
Over the mepis releases though, speed has been better. Mepis 6 beta 2 has been the quickest kde based distro i've ever used and it's fantastic in the level of thought that's gone into it.
i know theres speed improvements to be had on the services level, but what sort of development level of improvements have caused mepis to be faster? is it just the way the kernel and programs have been compiled or something like that?
Alan
Using Mepis...and proud of it.