knoppix is slooooooowwwww

[Mrmagic97_99]

Ok, after finally solving the burning issue, knoppix boots then a)it takes forever to finish loading,b)then when it finally finishes i can click on maybe one icon then it freezes....what gives

[Henk Poley]

Ok, after finally solving the burning issue, knoppix boots then a)it takes forever to finish loading,b)then when it finally finishes i can click on maybe one icon then it freezes....what gives
Okay, I experienced today that Knoppix-3.2-2003-04-28 boots slowly too, you see the background for about 10s, then the KDE boot-thingy comes up. Please specify "forever" ;-)

You could first try good ol' " knoppix checkcd" cheatcode (press F2, enter text and press [Enter]). This obviously shouldn't produce a failure :-)

If it does fail, I would advice to put knoppix on your HD, and I don't mean installing(!). Download CdMage (http://cdmage.cjb.net/) (a windows program), but any ISO mounting/editing software that can do file extraction would work (ex: deamon tools). Use it to extract the KNOPPIX directory from the downloaded ISO to any partition you like. Put it in the root though, like "D:\KNOPPIX\", else the bootfloppy won't find it. Then use mkfloppy.bat in the extracted KNOPPIX directory to generate a bootfloppy. Boot from it (dûh ;-)).

If the cdcheck was correct you could still try the bootfloppy or do the following. Try booting to a simpler windowmanager (aka anything but KDE), use the cheatcodes, since a frozen Knoppix is not something you would want. Fingers crossed :-P. And if it works you can now easely start a browser and post the output of "sudo dmesg" and "sudo lspci -v", run these commands from a console.

If it still doesn't work, boot with the cheat code "knoppix 2", it will boot to the bash commandline interface, the same environment as you see on the consoles under KDE. Type "sudo dmesg | more" and "sudo lspci -v | more". Write down anything that looks suspicious and post it to the forum so we can see into it. To shutdown Knoppix type "shutdown -h now", to reboot "shutdown -r now".

Do you have any kind of "special" hardware, USB stuff and the such?

[rickenbacherus]

Ok, after finally solving the burning issue, knoppix boots then a)it takes forever to finish loading,b)then when it finally finishes i can click on maybe one icon then it freezes....what gives

How much ram?

[Viro]

I think a lot of it has to do with KDE 3.1. I think KDE has grown rather large with this release and it requires more RAM than before.

[IoN_PuLse]

I have tried the KNOPPIX_V3.2-2003-03-24-EN release (i will try the 28 soon) and have noticed the MAJOR slowdown, and I have tried it on modern machines (512 RAM or more, athlon 1700+'s, 2200+'s) it doesn't matter how fast the machine is, the old version booted and operated much quicker.

[IoN_PuLse]

No answers? Nobody else has experienced the slowdown?

[rickenbacherus]

Sorry IoN - it works quite well for me on my old 550. Of course slow is a relative term. Perhaps if you had a stopwatch and timed it booting it might take a few seconds longer but nothing abnormal. At least not for me.

[IoN_PuLse]

Hmm it's strange, what I will do is boot the old one (and provide the exact version number) and then the new, and compare with the newest version.

I will time from my pressing the enter key to when KDE is fully at the desktop.

Do you think that the quality of CDs is the issue? I don't think it is, because I used the same cheap kind with the older version of Knoppix, but I guess I could try different CDs. Hmm.

By the way when I say slow, I mean old knoppix, less than 2 minute bootup, new knoppix, over 5 to 10 minute bootup.

[rickenbacherus]

That certainly is a long time- not normal at all. I have seen some of the poorere quality media effect results on a burn. It wouldn't be too hard to find out - I would get another .iso and some different media. Make sure to check the md5 sum before you burn. Other than that........??

[Peter]

A thought - if you have bad media - (read "cheap" media), and the drive is re-reading a bad spot over and over and finally get's it right, that could slow it down. If you have a fast burner, try burning at a slower speed, like 4x. Another thing that slows it down is waiting for a DHCP address. How many network cards are in the machine you have? Who is providing an address to the machine? If there is no DHCP server, it will take a little while to time-out.

Another thing to try is booting with DMA (Direct memory access). Specify

knoppix dma

on the boot prompt and see if that helps.

[Mrmagic97_99]

well, my comp has 512mb ddr 2700 and a p4 1.8 i finally gave up on knoppix. I used the first version on this same comp and was very pleased. I've moved on to Mandrake 9.0. Thankx for all the help!!!!

[IoN_PuLse]

I've tried the older version on many computers, with no more than a single network card each. They all had plenty of RAM, and I burnt it at 12x (my burner's speed) and at 48x (a burner at work) on cheap media with no issues. Knoppix booted up fine on all the machines, including my own.

The new version seems to take an abnormal time (all of the time) but everything works (eventually), no errors come up so I'm not sure if it's a md5sum issue. There is no timeout occuring with the network card, the whole thing is slow even through the detection phase in framebuffer mode. (Before X starts, but it takes a couple of minutes from X being started to actually getting into KDE)
I never had to specify DMA before (with the older version) but I guess I will try it, I'm going to keep trying and testing things out.

[mfischer]

KDE 3.1~ is a damn monster. Knoppix on my main machine (anything past 3-24 I think) which is a 1575mhz (overclocked) AMD T-bird and 512mb of DDR 2100 running at full 2400 slows to a crawl.

Do what I do. Fluxbox. :)

Boots in seconds.

I hope they fix gnome soon..

[RockMumbles]

It's not knoppix it's kde 3.1.1, on my debian system kdeinit is using 60% of my cpu almost all of the time.

my load average for a single user desktop system is 2.44, 2.05, 1.77
it never used to hardly ever used to get to 1.00, 1.00, 1.00
it was usually below 1 almost always.

I hope kde gets fixed soon, I'm bummed I upgraded to it!

rock

[IoN_PuLse]

What's Fluxbox?

I personally don't think it's KDE, it's slow before KDE even starts, I think it's my CD media, but I'm going to test further.

[IoN_PuLse]

Update: It seemed to be the media, it's booting much faster now.

[rickenbacherus]

Fluxbox is a very light very different desktop environment. Try the
desktop=fluxbox cheat code. When I first saw it my reaction was "what the...?" :D

It's interesting to note that KDE3.1 is hogging so many resources on some very fast machines however, my 550 w/256 megs runs it no problem. Go figure???

[cascadefx]

What's Fluxbox?

I personally don't think it's KDE, it's slow before KDE even starts, I think it's my CD media, but I'm going to test further.

Fluxbox is another window manager for X windows. It is really small and pretty fast. I use this on older systems.

I did a side by side comparison of Knoppix 3.1 and 3.2 on the same machine and 3.2 is very slow comparitively when booting into KDE. KDE is the culprit. It should speed up over time, look for KDE 3.1.2+ to have code and speed enhancements.

If you need speed use the boot cheatcodes to specify a different Window Manager.

[RockMumbles]

How about a little question/answer about v.3.2.

(1) what kind of processor and how much memory are you using?
(2) what version are you running?
(2) is knoppix 3.2 really slow, slightly slower, or about the same as v.3.1

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

My answers:

booting from cd at school on a PIII-450 w/ 128MB ram with the 3-26 release the boot process is longer (it's doing a few more things), and 3.2 seems slightly slower than 3.1 when running. (kde 3.1.1 is almost as fast from cd on these machines as it is on my AMD-400 woody install after kde 3.1.1 has been running for two or three days)

Note: I had a 3-23 release that took forever to load, I threw the cd and iso away!

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

It seems weird to me that 3.2 3-26 runs OK on a PIII-450 w/ 128mb ram but not on new high speed machines, cd problems?

rock

[IoN_PuLse]

All the machines I tested 3.1 on were 1700+'s and above, even a duron 1.3ghz, with 256 MB or RAM or more, and it was really fast. 3.2 seemed to be VERY slow, I'm not talking about just KDE but even before that. It seems to have been my cd media, now everything is quite fast although I noticed KDE being a little slower, it's not that much of a difference. (for me) Sure looks nicer :)

[rickenbacherus]

Sure looks nicer :)

But they took away my news ticker!!! I gotta have it. What if somebody farted on the other side of the world and I didn't know about it!! I hate to even THINK about it. :shock: Glad you got it working IoN. Of course if you'd quit setting your martinis on the cd before you try to boot it my guess is that it would work much better. :D

[IoN_PuLse]

Nah I just need to spend a couple more cents per CD :D

[cascadefx]

Just ran some trials again on a 128MB PentiumIII.

The 3.2 version from 3-30-2003 does exhibit better performance (loading KDE 3.1 about 20 seconds fasters) than earlier version of 3.2 (including the 3-24-2003 and 3-28-2003 burns).

Just thought I would keep everyone up-to-date