LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Andrew Allison <aallison@eleceng.adelaide.edu.au>
  To  : linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
  Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 14:47:10 +0930

Mandrake V6.1 is very slow to boot

Dear colleagues,

I have had some fun... and some heartache...over the Christmas 
new-year break...  :-)

I have recently installed Mandrake V6.1 to replace an earlier 
installation of Red-Hat V4.5.

The old system was dual boot. It had a 2.1GB HDD partitioned into 
two partitions of approximately 1GB each. The default LILO boot 
option was MS-DOS 6.0  and the other option was Red-Hat LINUX 
V4.5.

The first thing that I noticed is that Mandrake is very hungry for 
resources. The box specs. suggest that I need >= 64MB of RAM 
and >= 1.5 GB of HDD. (My largest partition was only 1.0GB)

I installed an additional 64GB of RAM and I now have 96 MB of 
RAM in the Linux machine.

I installed an 8.4GB IDE HDD as master on port 0 and I moved the 
CD-ROM to the slave on port 0.  My old 2.1GB SCSI drive, with all 
the valuable data from my earlier work, is still installed as a 
mountable drive.

(The machine has an ethernet card but that does not have much to 
talk to at the moment. The Linux host and a Win-98 machine are 
both connected to a 10baseT hub. My plan is to set up a small 
LAN and install SAMBA and allow the sharing of files and data 
between the Win98 and Linux environments. )

First the good news. The automatic installation was fairly easy. But 
wait... There is more good news the systems seems to work quite 
well and I have been able to carry out useful work. There are quite a 
number of interesting applications with Mandarke 6.1 and most of 
them seem to work quite well. I like the graphical environment, 
called KDE.

One other thing that I like is that the printer drivers work better than 
the old Red Hat 4.5 installation. I can print post-script files to my 
antique HP Desk-Jet 500.

Now for the bad news.. The system takes a long... long time to 
boot.. I have not timed it exactly but I would estimate that it takes 
about 5 minutes to get a login prompt and another 15 minutes to 
get the windows manager, KDE, up and running. (Xemacs is also 
very slow to launch.)

Can anyone suggest where I should start investigating to find the 
cause of this slow boot problem.

My suspicions are that the boot problem could be caused by :

1/ I may have installed software which has no corresponding 
hardware? (The machine paused for a long time while launching 
amd)

2/ Maybe the system is wasting time time polling the (non-
existent) network on the other side of the network card.. 

3/ The screen blinks and flashes while it boots and I see some 
rather strange (large) fonts flash briefly onto the screen. There may 
be a problem with video modes?

4/ Maybe the old processor (Pentium 133MHz) is too slow for 
mandrake V6.1

4/ Any other theories?   :-(

I would welcome any suggestions that the group may have. Given 
that my valuable data is still stored on the SCSI drive I am not 
adverse to a complete re-installation of LINUX  but I would want to 
"get it right" next time. Can anyone advise me?

Regards

Andrew Allison


 

Andrew G Allison (aallison@eleceng.adelaide.edu.au)
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
University of Adelaide
http://www.eleceng.adelaide.edu.au/Personal/aallison/