KDE/Konqueror/Konsole slow, unreliable?

[anandfan]

Noob here. I've got Mandrake 9.1 (thanks, cheapbytes.com) running here. So far, I've had more lockups under the above trio in one day than I have with WinXP in a whole month. The last time I ran Konsole, it froze when I tried an 'ls' command. I've also had 'vim' lockup. I'm wondering if these programs are that unstable or maybe I have bad hardware. I'm using a K7S5A board (SIS chipset, Athlon XP 1600+, 512 MB DDR) and Radeon vid card. The motherboard has only been used less than 10 hours in WinME. Also, the software seems to take 3-4 times longer to load a web page as does WinXP.

FWIW: I may be a noob to Linux, but I've been around computers before there was even a command line! Just punched cards with JCL and Fortran. CP/M was a godsend. I'm looking at doing some Java development (for fun) and running across multiple platforms.

 

[Sunner]

I use KDE on a daily basis, have been doing for years in fact, and I've had a crash or two with Konqueror, no more than Mozilla, IE, or any other browser though.
I've yet to see the 3.1 series crash even once.
As for the Konsole or Vim, I can't remember seeing either of them crash, ever.

I'd say you have some problem with your comp, unless Mandrake did something funny.
Must say, while I don't own any myself, the K7S5A seems like one of the most troublesome mobos ever, even though the people who have working boards seem very happy.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Is it just the program? What happens when they lock up? Things like vim should never lock up. Also, if something in a console seems to have locked up, you might have hit control S, which is XOFF for flow control, e.g. it freezes terminal activity. Hit control Q (XON) to reverse it. That stuff was used way back when busy terminals could cause horrid lag on remote connections and whatnot.

FWIW, when I first installed mandrake it froze and was super buggy/crashy. I'm not sure if it was a bad cd or whatever, but I tried redhat after that and it was fine.

 

[anandfan]

Thanks,guys, for the replies. The 'crashes' are more in the nature of unresponsive to keyboard actions. I used the reset button to reboot. I'll try a dual-boot with Mandrake on another system I have that can run Windows XP for days at a time. The K7S5A may not be good enough.

I'd really like to get the Linux box set up so that it is as responsive and reliable as Windows XP has been (never did get a reliable install of Win95/98/98SE/ME).

I appreciate the friendly responses here. Some of the Linux newsgroups can be savage on noobs!

 

[drag]

I am not sure what is causing your problems. I have the k7s5a motherboard, too and it is indeed a tempermental beast. It could be a problem with drivers or something, but i doubt that is it entirely. It does freeze occasionally when the the cpu is under high loads. Usually I can get around it by simply hitting ctrl+alt f1 (or f2 thru f6) and that will pop me into regular text mode console. Then you can get back into X windows by hitting ctrl+alt f7.


Probably what is happening is that KDE is a very graphical intensive enviroment. Having anti-aliased everything and that sort of stuff. And your computer is having a hard time dealing with it. I am not saying that 1600+ is to slow or anything remotely like that, but that your video card is not running with accelerated drivers. That's why most linux gaming/home-type people use NVIDIA cards, because they are well supported by NVIDIA and provide quality drivers. ATI doesn't do that so well. So depending on which version of Radean video cards they have various states of acceleration using the DRI interface and/or ATI's own proprietory drivers.

* RADEON 9700
* RADEON 9000
* RADEON 8500
* FireGL Workstation products
are supported directly by ATI
For more info goto ATI's own website
RADEON 9700

XFree86 drivers available on the ATI website support hardware 3D acceleration (RPM format for i386 only at this time).

From ATI's website mentioning opensource-type drivers=

Open source 3D drivers may also be available or under development from the DRI Project.
RADEON 9000
RADEON 8500
RADEON 3D drivers are available from the DRI Project.
RAGE 128
RAGE PRO 3D support is a work in progress from the UTAH-GLX Project.

That's about all I can do for you, but if you use accelerated drivers (if you aren't alread) it should make a world of difference. And should increase the responsiveness of X windows by 200%.
I never used ATI with linux, but i am curious about how well they work because I thought about buying one, but wasn't sure about it.

Good Luck

 

[Sunner]

Since drag brought up performance, and since Mandrake is an eyecandy intenseive distro, you could try adding Option "RenderAccel" "True" to your XFree conf file.
Should be /etc/X11/XF86Config, or in some cases /etc/X11/XF86Config-4

 

[anandfan]

I installed Linux on my most trusted box, then made an auto reinstall floppy. I put the floppy in the machine I'm having trouble with and reformatted/reinstalled Mandrake there. This second install, I included a couple more packages (like Web servers). Whatever the new packages brought in, seemed to help a lot. DHCP worked for the first time, and I've run a couple of hours now with no lockup. Performance even feels better, although I'll checkout Sunner's last suggestion.