I did the Knoppix install to hard drive option. Boy was that easy! My system is IDE, with two quite new WD hardrives, Linux on the second one, the slave on the first channel.

550MHz AMD,K-2 384 Megs. Matrox Millenium video. I put it onto a 3 gig partition and made a 1G partition for the swap file.

Its so slow I get mad at it waiting for windows to open and applications to start running. With OS/2 and Win2K on the same computer, they run quickly, windows snap open, and screens redraw very fast so I am used to a responsive system.

Logged in as root.

I am using the KDE desktop that it defaults to and when I click on the phony start button, it takes a full second to start to open the menus, and then it slowly pops open the menu. Scrolling the mouse up that menu like I would in the windows system and the graphics do not "keep up" so I have to wait while some buttons redraw as I pass over them. It takes over two seconds for the Konsole window to open, and a bit more than that for the file browser to get ready.

The thing that is really killing me is the file search. I open the file browser and set up a search for a file that I name explictly, no wildcards, which I know is on the system drive, and the search takes over three minutes. Since the partition is only 3G total, this is intolerable.

I really like what I see, but its too slow to cope with and I suppose that if I was an expert Linux user, I would be better able to accept it, but in learning, I am making mistakes, I search for files, I open the wrong windows, and its just too much for me to deal with so I end up with a headache. In a week, I have locked the system up hard a dozen times and had to bail with the reset button :-)

I tried to do the eval program from codeweavers, curious to see if it could do what it says. Something went wrong with it, but the whole system is just too slow and unresponsive to support a serious debugging effort, so I have abandoned the Linux for now.

I know about hdparm utility, but I am not inclined to mess with something that potentially destructive.

Can I hear from others who have installed the Debian system from the CD onto the same computer they run windows or OS/2 on, with regards to performance? I always thought Linux, in general, was a quick, snappy system, but I am not seeing that. Instead, I am back to using a 486-33 CPU.

I tried other desktops that come in the package, but its about the same kind of problem.

Any words of wisdom? Suggestions. Disagreement? :)

If you read this far, I would also like to know how to get my CDs out of the drive when in Linux. They will not open via the button on the drive, Where is the eject command?

And, to overstay my welcome here, how do you "unmount" a drive? Unmount is not a command here..

Thanks a lot for any words of wisdom, or consolation, or encouragement :-)

John