[ltp] Fedora-11 on T23 - very slow

[Timothy Murphy]

I installed Fedora-11 on my newly acquired Thinkpad T23
by burning the Fedora-netinst ISO to a CD, and running this.
My first try failed because the formatting on a partition
continued for 2 or more hours before I interrupted it,
with the dreadful Anaconda yo-yo going backwards and forwards.

So I formatted the partition "by hand" with mkfs.ext3
and ran netinst again, without requestion any formatting.

This time it ran perfectly, installing F-11 on a bare partition.
Rather to my suprise it did not ask me for an URL
but found a server itself,
and installed 1111 packages quite quickly.

However, the resulting system, though usable,
has several problems:

1. Responses to key-strokes and other input seems inordinately slow.
Eg on moving the cursor, it disappears briefly
before re-appearing at the new position.

3. Other responses are equally slow,
eg after clicking on the f-icon,
it takes 5 seconds for the menu to appear.

2. It takes about 90 seconds from entering login name
to appearance of desktop and panel.

4. Response to typing is very slow.
Having typed a letter, it takes half a second for it to appear.

5. I notice that X while is running (R) it is taking 98-99% CPU,
though after a time when it starts sleeping (S) this drops to a normal 5.6%.
If I move the cursor X starts running again
(which it does not do on other machines)
and again takes up a huge amount of CPU.

The kernel I am running is 2.6.29.4-167.fc11.i686.PAE .
(I'm not sure what the PAE means?)
I have run "yum update"; this only brought in one package.
The machine has 1GB RAM.

Any observations gratefully received.

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College Dublin