everything is just....sluggish, help?

[deepmenace]

hi all.

my first go at anything linux, just put mint on an old laptop and everything is just a bit slow.

the laptop is a thinkpad 600x, p3 coppermine....maybe a 500mhz cpu i think, 300 odd mb too. mint has been brilliant so far, easy install, wifi thru pcmcia card worked straight off

it feels like in windowsxp when the default gfx card driver is installed, windows take an age to update and sometimes appear in stages.

anyone have any tricks to speed things up? can i make things less pretty?

is there a way i can find out if the gfx card has proper drivers?

thanks.

[Telecaster72]

You could try installing the xfce4 desktop environment, also try to find lightweight apps like Abi word instad of open office, gnumeric for spreadsheets, audacious instead of amarok and so on, do a search for "lightweight" at ubuntuforums.org, Dont use big pictures as desktop wallpapers or fancy big iconsets...

install xfce
sudo apt-get install xfce4
logout and choose xfce session when you log in again.

You could look into windowmanagers like fluxbox also.

Or install the xfce version of mint i use it and it is really good! The regular one with gnome or kde is a bit heavy for you machine.

[deepmenace]

ok thanks. scfe sounds good.

just tried to do the xcfe thing but when i click "terminal" the scren goes black and i get thrown back to logon screen!?!?!

[Telecaster72]

hmm thats odd, never happened to me, is it when you start the terminal from within xfce or did you not get that far as to install it yet?
If the regular mint is such a strain on you computer that you cant start the terminal it would probably not work with Mint Xfce either.
You could try the XFCE Community Edition BETA 008, works great for me on AMD Duron 1.3/256 sdram
Or howabout trying fluxbuntu? Mint is based on Ubuntu, and Fluxbuntu is Ubuntu with Fluxbox ontop, really lightweight, it is some work getting mp3, divx, encrypted DVD's to work, but under the hood it is the same thing as Mint, just a little rougher around the edges.
Fluxbox is not as pretty as Gnome though, but what can you expect, as long as you get the job done right?

Get it here:
http://www.fluxbuntu.org/js.html

Get your media codecs and howto make them work here:
http://medibuntu.org/