Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 11:05:33 -0400 From: Bill Schmitt <bilsch@schmittnet.com> To: pryan@singnet.com.sg Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Need advice Message-ID: <4145B73D.4010902@schmittnet.com> In-Reply-To: <200409111128.i8BBSYR7025569@eastgate.starhub.net.sg> References: <200409111128.i8BBSYR7025569@eastgate.starhub.net.sg>
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I appreciate the suggestions, Peter. I picked up a new card over the weekend, and have been working through getting that installed. You'll probably see a new note to the list later today on that, since my impressions of the installation processes are dropping by the minute. Bill Peter Ryan wrote: -----Original Message----- Bill Schmitt (SW) Sent: Saturday, September 11, 2004 17:37 To: [1]freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Need advice Considering all of that, my questions are: - Am I being unrealistic in choosing a machine with a 300MHz processor? - If I add another 128MB of memory, should I expect to see a dramatic improvement? - Could the graphics adapter itself be the bottleneck? - If I picked up a newer graphics adapter that was supported by xorg, would a switch to 5.x and/or xorg be expected to pick up the speed a bit? Thanks to anyone who might help fill in the blanks. Bill I am an ultra newbie to everything *nix, so bear that in mind when considering what I write. I would watch out for your swap space setting. One of my 'play' machines has only 64MB memory. When i set swap too big (512MB on one occasion), the KDE desktop ran like a dead dog. Switching back to a more reasonable swap fixed that problem. I had been installing from the 4.10R CD, included KDE selected as a desktop. This installed a KDE package from the CD. This caused me no end of problems when I tried to install some other packages wanting more recent versions of things KDE used. I may have chosen poorly when selecting what to do about that, but I have now settled on an install procedure which seems to avoid most of the problems I have encountered - so far :) I install from the 4.10CD, and only select cvsup from the package collection. I dont install a desktop from the list offered during the sysinstall. I then rebuild the ports completely using cvsup. I then install /usr/ports/sysutils/portupgrade. I then run portsdb -Uu Then I upgrade the few packages that are already there (primarily XFree86) with portupgrade -a. This procedure has served me well so far. It is based on the OnLamp article and much assistance from Matthew Seaman and others on this list. [2]http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/08/07/FreeBSD_Basics.html [3]http://www.onlamp.com/lpt/a/4111 and the patch suggested by Matthew for a portsdb problem,which worked. [4]http://archive.pilgerer.org/mharc/html/freebsd-questions/2004-09/msg00563.ht ml Once that is done i go on with whatever packages I want to try, including the desktop. I found the best place to look through the questions mailing list is [5]http://archive.pilgerer.org/mharc/html/freebsd-questions/ The layout of threads is excellent Hope something here helps Peter References 1. mailto:freebsd-questions@freebsd.org 2. http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/08/07/FreeBSD_Basics.html 3. http://www.onlamp.com/lpt/a/4111 4. http://archive.pilgerer.org/mharc/html/freebsd-questions/2004-09/msg00563.ht 5. http://archive.pilgerer.org/mharc/html/freebsd-questions/
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