Sick of Xubuntu, wanto to try Crunchbang

[dkm777]

Hi guys,

I've been using Xubuntu on my ancient ThinkPad T41 and frankly I'm getting sick and tired of sluggishness that is even worse that XP that it came with originally. I want to install Crunchbang, since I used it some time ago on an even older ThinkPad A20m and it felt faster than this. The problem is, I don't have much time to play around with different versions and wanted to ask, which one to use - regular or with backports? It says on Crunchbang's site that the backport version has many updated packages, but since I'm installing it on old hardware, those updates might actually make it slower. The machine is used for web browsing, music, videos (including DVD playback) and light word processing. Right now it's nearly impossible to do more than 2 things at a time with Xubuntu. Will the backport version of Crunchbang be the same?

 

[lxskllr]

Backports will give you more modern software. I don't think it makes a big difference on performance. I think you have some other issue going on there. There's no way Xubuntu is slower than XP. Ubuntu 10.04 is faster than XP, and that should have similar resource usage to Xubuntu.

 

[dkm777]

I suspect the video driver. It feels like I have no video acceleration - window movement, scrolling and menus are just awfully slow.

On another note, I installed Crunchbang with backports in a VM and goddamn, their XFCE setup guzzles RAM like there's no tomorrow. I didn't notice anything weird in the default Openbox setup except it made me feel like in the good old days when I was first discovering Linux . Definitely installing on the ThinkPad when I have time. I just hope my wireless card works.

 

[Jodell88]

I think things went downhill when AMD/ATI dropped support for older cards in the official drivers.

 

[PCTC2]

I use #! on my T61, though I do use the Openbox setup. It uses barely 300MB of RAM at any given time, though I can't compare performance from a T41 to a T61, but I enjoy #! a lot.

 

[lxskllr]

I've been digging Zenix. It's lightweight, but you have access to the full Debian repos...

http://zenix-os.net/

 

[ch33zw1z]

I've been digging Zenix. It's lightweight, but you have access to the full Debian repos...

http://zenix-os.net/

that looks pretty sweet.

 

[janas19]

Just downloaded Lubuntu today. According to all my Google searches, reviewers like LXDE over XFCE. Will give it a shot sometime soon hopefully.

 

[Jawadali]

I was using Lubuntu for a couple days on a trip (I think it was version 10.04). This was on a laptop with a ~1Ghz ULV Pentium M and 512MB of RAM.

For basic browsing and word processing, it seemed to work fine. I was even using LibreOffice instead of AbiWord.

 

[hasu]

Backports will give you more modern software. I don't think it makes a big difference on performance. I think you have some other issue going on there. There's no way Xubuntu is slower than XP. Ubuntu 10.04 is faster than XP, and that should have similar resource usage to Xubuntu.

I just installed lubuntu (the latest available as of last week) on Compaq Presario 2145US Notebook (which came originally with WinXP Home). I feel that WinXP Home worked better than lubuintu. I was trying to use a development platform CodeTyphon (lazarus aka freepascal) on it. I will re-install Windows XP and do a direct comparison or some benchmarking soonish. Are there any benchmarks between any light weight linux distro and Windows XP?

 

[lxskllr]

Are there any benchmarks between any light weight linux distro and Windows XP?

I don't really know of many that would compare apples to apples. Off the top of my head, you could time how long it takes to compress a large file. You could also time startup, and shutdown time. That isn't really a great bench, but it would indicate user experience.

Maybe I'll look around and see if there's stuff that can be directly compared between them, cause I'd be interested to know. GNU/Linux /feels/ faster to me, but feelings aren't quantifiable.

Edit:
You could transcode video with Handbrake and time it. There's a native client for both platforms.

Edit2:
You could compare frame rates between a couple libre games. There's a decent number available for both platforms. Java applications could be useful too, though I don't know of any specific ones.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Don't forget web-browser benchmarks.

 

[Modelworks]

For older laptops I find puppy linux to be the best. Runs fast and stable.

 

[dkm777]

Got #! installed last night and it was just more of the same. Looks like Radeon drivers really are not up to par, or the overhead of X is just too great for this old system. Managing windows and using menus was snappy, but any amount of scrolling would load up the CPU 100% and I could see frames being redrawn. I guess it's finally time to nuke the drive and give this ThinkPad away o be recycled :'(.

 

[theevilsharpie]

I encountered the same problem with my old laptop (AMD Turioun with an older R300-based Radeon GPU) when I had Compiz running. The laptop would work, but any type of window manipulation (scrolling, moving windows around, resizing, etc) was really sluggish. Disabling compositing and going back to a 2D desktop resolved the speed issue.

 

[dkm777]

I'm not even running compiz. I tried to enable both xcompmgr and cairo-compmgr and while the former was not much worse than no compositing at all, the cairo version slowed down everything like you said. Not running compositing still has very slow scrolling. Guess it's time to start saving for a Brazos laptop. Pity the selection is abysmal here. The only worthwhile candidate is the VAIO Y.

 

[lxskllr]

Maybe you have a hardware problem. I had a Dell laptop once that had the heatpipes go bad on the heatsink. It would overheat, and everything would start creeping.

 

[some_guy]

FYI

I am posting this from a Thinkpad x31 with 2 gb of memory and Ubuntu 10.10. I have virtualbox running XP and a realtime .NET program running under XP. I have openoffice open and a youtube video playing without any problems. I also have tmz.com up and it pages up and down without problems and only minor varitions in the CPU usage. It takes about 35 seconds to boot with a 5400 rpm seagate IDE drive. I have top running in a terminal and it indicates most of the memory is being used, with (100 MB of buffers), no swap being used.

When the video is playing the CPU shows about 61%, without the video, about 26%. Increasing the size of the video does not change CPU utilization very much.

The x31 has a 1.4 MHz Pentium M which is probably similar to your CPU but a bit slower, and your bus probably is faster. It has a radeon graphics card that probably is not the same as yours and the screen is 1024 x 768 which probably is less pixels than yours has.

And I don't do anything special tweeking the OS.

So I can understand you being frustrated with slow performance on a computer that should perform.

It might be useful to include how much memory you have and what OS versions you use for your installs.

Thought:

A newer version of linux/ubuntu may do a better job utilizing your graphics card. That has been my experience.