VERY Slow Startup

[psic]

Ok... what distribution would you recommend for optimal speed and ease of use?! I mean, simple GUIs usually mean 99.9% of resources gobbled up anyway

Well, for outright speed, Gentoo, but I wouldn't recommend it to a new user. I'd go with Vector Standard, the latest version is 5.1. It has a few light WM's, among them Xfce, Fluxbox, and I think IceWM. It boots VERY fast (on one of my computers, a fast 2.8ghz celeron with 512 RAM, it is almost twice as fast as Suse 9.1, which itself was a bit slower than windows XP). Of the distros I've tried on the computer I mentioned, the boot times (minus the time where I entered the username and password) are (about, this was with a wristwatch, swiss but still not very exact):

Win XP: 60 sec.
Suse 9.1 (KDE): 90+ sec.
SimplyMepis (KDE): 75 sec.
SimplyMepis (Xfce): 60 sec.
Morphix (Xfce): 50 sec.
Vector (Xfce): 37 sec.

Note that in suse, I had some eyecandy running (not karamba, but weather plugin and such), in Windows, a few programs run at startup (firewall, anti-virus...), in all the xfce distros, I didn't have a splash screen, and starting with the first mepis, I turned off any services which I knew I didn't need. Next time I get bored, I'll time my laptop (p3 800 Mhz, 128 Mb ram, Kanotix) and post the results.

[deek]

I am running Slackware 10.1 with Fluxbox on my PII 350Mhz and it is very fast. Granted, I have 256MB of RAM (maxed out) to boot. If you can add some more RAM to your system, its cheap and will help out a bunch.

I started with SUSE and it was slow on my machine (similar to yours), so then I tried Slack and haven't been happier!

[deek]

I am running Slackware 10.1 with Fluxbox on my PII 350Mhz and it is very fast. Granted, I have 256MB of RAM (maxed out) to boot. If you can add some more RAM to your system, its cheap and will help out a bunch.

I started with SUSE and it was slow on my machine (similar to yours), so then I tried Slack and haven't been happier!

[psic]

I forgot to mention that Vector is based on Slackware. And that in any distro, programs will work faster if you compile them from source (this is what makes Gentoo so fast).

[deek]

That's right, I forgot Vector was based on Slack. That makes it a very good choice!

[S. M. Ibrahim]

I am running Slackware 10.1 with Fluxbox on my PII 350Mhz and it is very fast. Granted, I have 256MB of RAM (maxed out) to boot. If you can add some more RAM to your system, its cheap and will help out a bunch.

I started with SUSE and it was slow on my machine (similar to yours), so then I tried Slack and haven't been happier!

Strange!!!!!!! I tried Slackware 10.1 but i got slow, but now using Suse 9.3 and happy with this.