Operating Systems > Linux and UNIX
looking for a new distro
voidmain:
No, the hdparm is a Linux command. When in Linux have a shell open and run the "top" command. By default it sorts the process list by CPU utilization. When the hard drive light is flashing take note of the top couple of processes. Let me know what those processes are and what %CPU they are using. Also get some numbers from the top of the "top" display: CPU States, Mem, and Swap.
One thing that can cause a lot of hard drive activity right after startup is a command/process called "updatedb". What this does is creates a database of all files on your hard drive, for the "locate" command, and is usually set to run late at night when there should be little activity. Problem is, on a laptop you probably shut it off at night so the updatedb will run as soon as you start it up the next day. If this is the cause of your hard drive problem and you don't care about the locate database you can disable this command. Also what services do you have running? If you are running redhat you can do this:
$ /sbin/chkconfig --list | grep on
Dragging windows slowly to me is most probably a video card performance issue. According to everything I have read this video card was not supported until v4.2 of XFree86. What version are you running? But there are a few reports on the 1805-S204 at http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/toshiba.html
Someone else mentioned having slow problems with this card here: http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/xpert/2002-March/016492.html
And fixed it using a driver from here: http://www.xfree86.org/~alanh/ (assuming you have XFree86 v4.2.0).
And this page is interesting for a toshiba laptop owner and also mentions the above driver giving accelerated X capability: http://www.zadok.org.uk/laptop/html/single.html
It also mentions a "toshset" command that gives lots of info for toshiba laptops. You might want to download, install it and run "toshset -q" and post the output. Get the command here: http://www.schwieters.org/toshset/
[ November 11, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]
Stryker:
thanks void main, those were quite helpfull. I don't mean to sound like a retard or anything but how do i go about installing the object file you linked me to? I'll probably have to recompile my kernel but i am not sure how to have that compile with it.
voidmain:
No, you shouldn't have to recompile your kernel. First make sure you are running XFree86 v4.2.0. If you are not then do not perform this procedure until we do more research. If you are running v4.2.0 then download the http://www.xfree86.org/~alanh/trident_drv.o file to /tmp, then open a shell and do this:
# cd /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers
# cp trident_drv.o trident_drv.o.bak
# cp /tmp/trident_drv.o .
It may ask if you want to overwrite, answer yes.
# chmod 755 trident_drv.o
Then restart Xwindows and see if it helps. If it does not or if it causes problems you may have to revert back to the old driver (and you may have to do this at a text console if X doesn't work). To revert back from a text console, log in as root:
# cd /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers
# cp trident_drv.o.bak trident_drv.o
Then start X and you should be back to where you were before this little exercise.
[ November 11, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]
Stryker:
This corrected the problem for dragging the windows and such, but launching programs takes forever. I open the shell and it stops and thinks for about 9 seconds or so before opening. I tried top and the top few were X, init, top(obviously), and kdeinit. So now what I have left to do is disable the updatedb and somehow make these damned programs launch faster.
voidmain:
How long is forever? You seem to have respectable disk I/O at 20MB/s. If it takes like 20 seconds to bring up a terminal then there is something else wrong. It very possibly could be network related (X has networking built in to it and improper networking configuration can often cause either X not to start or be very slow). What distro and version are you using again?
Also, in the top command how much % idle did it show at the top? And what did it show for memory/swap?
Also, "gnome-terminal" in Gnome and "konsole" in KDE are resource hogs for just being a terminal. Try pressing "ALT+F2" and type in "xterm" and hit enter. Compare the speed with typing in "gnome-terminal" or "konsole". xterm doesn't have to start all the in-between layers of crap that the gnome-terminal and konsole have to. I find Gnome apps to be slower than KDE apps and straight X apps are the fastest.
[ November 11, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]
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