Thank you Realto,
your cordiality is always welcome, I wished it was a bit more helpful,
though... Since I started the discussion, and was asking for help from smart
people like you, I would have expected to receive a bit of support, rather
than stating the obvious... so any suggestions or experiences for the odd
behaviour of slackware 10.0 (or any other distro, for that matter) on the
above machine type??

Bill - that is a good suggestion. I did try the hdparm and switched on and
off the dma option... saw the changes in performance (slowed down from
19mb/sec to 3mb/sec transfer rates) but did not improve the total
situation... maybe there is a trick?
Will try to see if there is anything specific between Fedora and the files
of slack... I still have disk 3 (ready system) Thanx again!

I will post an update of test.

To repeat the issue:
PIII 600, 384MB RAM, I810 (I82810) board, 30MB HDD
The system pauses for 5 second (aprox) after launching and before processing
an application (like less, man etc.)

Cordially and with regards,
Vladimir


Realto Margarino <boogie@eewwww.org> wrote in message
news:lIsVc.36337$Tr.1704227@news20.bellglobal.com. ..
> Marcus Moeller <m.moeller@wrede-online.de> wrote:
> > Bill Taggart wrote:
>
> > > Hmm, it just doesn't make sense. I like redhat, we use it at
> > > work, but switched back to slack after the newer versions of RH
> > > were giving me terrible performance. I run slack on a Pii 300
> > > and PIII T40 IBM laptop and it runs great. One time I had a
> > > weird issue with X - ran better on RH than slack. I installed
> > > both OSe's side by side on the same machine and was able to
> > > mount the root disk as a regular partition so I could compare
> > > set up and config files. If you have the time that might be the
> > > way to go. Just a guess but made its has something to ATA
> > > drive?? Do you look at the hdparm settings?
>
> > Hi,
>
> > I?ve tested a lot of disrtos in the past, but I really find slack
> > the fastest. It takes about 30 Seconds to boot the bare.i kernel,
> > and even KDE starts very fast.
>
> There is _no_ difference in speed between the various
> distributions, unless those distributions are setup in different
> ways. But if you know anything at all about linux you will have it
> setup the way you want and you will find no difference.
>
> cordially, as always,
>
> rm