cursor keeps pausing

English Hardware
1

Hello,

Been away from SuSE & Linux for some years now, but looking to get back into it. I have an older laptop (Sony Vaio PCG-FR31, Celeron 2.40GHz, 512 MB RAM) that I’d like to use as a shop computer - the requirements aren’t great, just to be able to run a browser like FireFox, run the occasional office program like Open Office Writer or Calc, and view PDFs now and again.

The laptop is currently set up for dual boot with WinXP; even with things stripped down considerably it’s pretty much a dog under that OS with all the updates. The first time I installed a Linux OS on this laptop it was Debian 4.0… seemed okay but I couldn’t get the USB wireless recognized. Figured I’d go back and install a little more ‘polished’ OS; SuSE had always been pretty good for me in that regard in the past. First SuSE install w/ KDE 3.5 was fine on first blush, but rather slow… the mouse cursor kept hanging up for 5+ seconds here and there, every 10-15 seconds or so, which made for a pretty frustrating GUI experience. Even switching WMs to XFCE seemed pretty slow compared to past experience.

After some reading, I decided that maybe reinstalling with a more minimal environment might be in order… so I reinstalled w/ just XFCE and Windowmaker - no KDE, no GNOME, etc. Responsiveness is a little better, but still have fairly regular ‘pauses’ of the cursor.

Any ideas or suggestions? Seems like maybe there is something running in the background that is bogging things down perhaps… though I have no idea what it might be. I can weed thru some of the processes w/ top and ps, etc. but having some idea of a likely culprit would help.

I’d really rather not have to try running under fvwm or similar - I have memories of running on those ‘window’ systems back in the early days on Slackware… not fun.

Thanks,

Monte

2

Beagle is main culprit for this. When you have the problem (or do you have it all the time?), did you check what processes were running?
What were your results of : top

3

I’d read a mention of Beagle being a problem for some… but I don’t think it’s loaded this time (since I specifically selected ‘Other’ and ‘XFCE desktop’) though its possible it could have snuck in via dependency or something?

Anyway, the top listings from ‘top’ are: X, top, init, Terminal, kthreadd, migration/0, ksoftirqd/0 events/0, khelper, kblockd/0, etc. It fluctuates a bit, but generally those are the top half-dozen or so processes shown.

Thanks,

Monte

4

FWIW… I fired up YaST2 from Terminal and it appears Beagle is not installed. I tried passing the argument ‘nohz=off’ to the GRUB bootloader @ startup, but it doesn’t seem to have improved the situation any. It still pause/hang/freezes every little bit. Very frustrating.

Thanks,

Monte

5

what about your mem
you only have 512
how much is in use and is swap being used

maybe increase swapiness, I’m not sure if that will help.

6

Doesn’t appear that it’s even using the swap yet. My understanding is that the disk on this machine is pretty dog slow… if it was swapping it’d probably be even slower :sarcastic:

From top:

Mem: 449540k total 205164k used 244252k free 7388k buffers
Swap: 674688k total 0k used 674688k free 100640k cached