hello, i am sorry if this has been covered in any way or if this is an inappropriate forum, i have a few theories but anyways this is the issue im having,
laptop: HPze4427, with athlon xp-m 2200+, 1gig ram (dynamic shared for graphics im pretty sure), 30gig HD
i already have xp on it, so i DL and installed open suse dual boot as a trial before wiping out windows completely. everything went smooth, boots fine, but visual elements and most things seem slow and laggy (namely window fade in/out transitions) firefox wouldnt seem to start at all (was going to look for graphics driver but obviously cant). slow response when clicking “start button” and screen saver run at what i would guess as >1 fps.
there is likely more to this but i didnt play much with it, mouse pointer is fairly responsive, even wen rolling over menus and such
i will say that installing Suse took up practically all my free space on my hd (all but aprox 125mb)…does this seem like an issue due to my HD being full or a graphics card issue?
if any of this is confusing or you would like/need more info i will do what i can, i am far from novice, but in no way an expert (just rather experienced hobbyist)
last note, i have had a cd boot version of linuxmint running rather well on this laptop before i obtained it (was a “if you can get my files off this destroyed windows install you can have it”) before reinstalling xp.
sorry if any of tis is confusing, im new to forums and simply trying to give as much info as possible
What type of graphics card? 1 gig of RAM and a mere 125Mb of space for all the system (including root, /home and swap), it is not enoug IMO. It’ll be hard to have decent and smooth fluidity on a system with KDE and GNOME as DE. If you have kwin or compiz activated, it’ll be really disapointing.
If you chose to keep with 30Gb, maybe fluxbox or lxde should be better DEs for you.
For linux Mint, you ran it in liveCD? That’s why it ran smoothly. Once installed, I think ou’ll have the same performance as with openSUSE.
yes mint was off livecd, Graphics is Radeon IGP 320m. and the 125mb was after the Suse install completed, and i wasn’t planing on keeping this setup, just trying to test Suse prior to reformatting and making it a dedicated linux laptop.
i think my main question is whether a clean fresh install would or could solve this, or if there is a larger underlying issue.
It depends, my system takes up on ly 4.5Gb in root, I have 12Gb used in /home and a 6Gb swap (I have 4GB RAM). With 30Gb, you could have decent performance with a GNOME desktop.
So, 15Gb for root, 2Gb for swap max and the rest in /home (13Gb).
It is ok, but it is not a killer. It depends what you want to do with your system. If it’s for browsing and office, that should do it.
I chose Gnome (no specific reason, still really new to linux, only fiddled with it a bit, always out of a disdain for MS)
and yes, the real main purpose of this laptop is simply browsing, i have a decent desktop running win7 (i confess my sins lol) i run through my HDTV with wireless KB/mouse so i like this to be able to watch tv and surf the web/ look up things on the fly.
also i was actually drawn towards SUSE from a site i stumbled across with a pack or GUI scheme that mimics mac OSX leopard although this is a cool idea to me i fully understand more add-ons = less performance and is not my main goal, just reminded me of old plans to convert this laptop to linux
so then as a final clarification… if I was to reformat and do a clean install of SUSE these issues wouldnt be there? it actually runs xp fairly well (unless i start opening multiple tabs in chrome) but I think this old little laptop would be great as a stepping stone away from windows, and a good way to learn Linux without the total shock of abandoning everything ive been used to, and last i really messed around with installing linux (except mint livecd) was nearly 10 years ago and i remember from back then at least how Linux would run so much “faster” on significantly less resources.
Anyways, thank you very much for your swift and comprehensive help its been extremely informative and helpfull.
You should be able to get good performance, though LXDE as a desktop choice might be better. If you use the SUSE DVD the choice is in the installer here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10573557/11.3%20Install/10.jpg
Also available as cd download (I can find it if you are interested)
But I would generally advise not to use desktop effects on a low spec computer.
