Live CD SLOooooowww

[Al Gordon]

If you're going to compare Windows XP to an Ubuntu LiveCD, make sure
that you're running Windows from a CD as well (BartPE, maybe?). 
That's most likely the slowdown.  An OS running from a CD is bound to
be slower than one installed to disk.

In order to speed things up a bit, once the LiveCD is loaded, maybe
open the terminal and try typing 'sudo hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc'
(substituting "/dev/hdc" with the appropriate hardware device for your
cdrom drive) in order to enable DMA on the cdrom drive. I believe that
Ubuntu disables DMA by default on cdrom drives, for maximum
compatibility with older hardware, or something.

On 6/21/05, David Teague <davidbteague at verizon.net> wrote:
> 
> I recently received Ubuntu Live and Install CDs.
> 
> I ran the live CD on my older 500 MHz 512 MB
> RAM machine. I have never seen a system as slow.
> It took a full 2 minutes to load OpenOffice.org writer,
> 1:30 to load Firefox.
> 
> Once loaded, keyboard response is adequate but the
> load times are intolerable.
> 
> Knopppix, which uses KDE, runs a bit faster on this
> machine, but it isn't fast enough to be satisfactory.
> 
> Libranet is not quite as slow, but it is also too slow to be
> usable on this system. I plan to install Ubuntu to see how
> much of the slow loading is loading from the CD.
> 
> I really thought that Linux is supposed to make "old"
> hardware usable. I hope this isn't what they had in
> mind.
> 
> I have not tried XP on this machine, but I will.
> 
> XP runs fine on a 750 MHz 700MB machine. Woody
> with Gnome 1.4 runs fine on a 350 MHz 400MB machine.
> 
> Does anyone have questions to complete a picture of
> the system that you might need, or suggestions to explain
> this.
> 
> I hope for suggestions on how to speed things up short
> of a purchase of another machine.
> 
> David Teague,  http://cs.wcu.edu/~dbt
> Advocating Free Software and Double Bass tuned in fifths
> www.dennismasuzzo.com;  www.silviodallatorre.com
> www.joelquarrington.com/;  For information on Red  Mitchell,
> http://home.teleport.com/~mimuma/;  www.larryholloway.com
> 
> 
> 
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> 


-- 

  -- AL --