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shame - 07.07.2006, 06:47 Uhr
Titel: Life draining out of my kanotix

At around the start of the year I installed kanotix-2005-04 and one of the many things I was impressed with was the general speed of the desktop and everything.
Well after the first 6 weeks or so I noticed things were becoming a bit sluggish and it gradually slowed down more and more.
So I did a clean install of easter-2006 and noticed a huge difference but a couple of months down the line it is becoming frustratingly sluggish again.
I don't know if it's due to the nature of Debian sid and things being upgraded and changed a lot but at this rate it seems I'm going to have to do clean installs every 2 to 3 months.
Having said that, I installed suse 10.1 around the same time as easter-2006 and have lots of repos so things are also upgraded frequently but suse is running just as snappy as the day it was installed.

According to rcconf I have hardly any running services, just the following -

eciadsl
alsa-utils
bluetooth
cupsys
dbus
kdm
makedev

I've tried stopping cupsys and bluetooth but it makes no difference.
Anyone know what the problem might be?

I'm can almost hear the computer let out a sigh every time I select kanotix from grub.

slh - 07.07.2006, 10:09 Uhr
Titel: RE: Life draining out of my kanotix

apt-get clean
fix-fonts -e
check "df -h" for full partitions.

shame - 07.07.2006, 12:04 Uhr
Titel:

Done those but no difference.
I really can't see any particular reason for it all.
For example, when I first booted up today, I let the desktop load up and settle and then ran htop with nothing else running.
CPU was hovering between 2% and 5% memory was 64/512 and nothing seemed to be doing anything but then I launched konsole and it took a couple of seconds for the window to appear but a further 6 or 7 seconds for actual prompt to appear.
I then ran Thunderbird and the window appeared after a few seconds but the whole interface built up bit by bit until it finally fully appeared about 20 seconds later and it's the same with konqueror and most other apps.
I've been trying more simple themes and icons to see if that could be a cause but it still makes no difference.
I'm using 2 hard drives and have 2 distros on each at the moment and have no sluggishness issues with ubuntu, slackware or suse.
After I had this problem with the older kanotix I made a point of installing easter on the other hard drive and put suse 10.1 on the partition kanotix had been on so I don't believe there are any disk drive problems.

nemesis - 07.07.2006, 17:08 Uhr
Titel:

Are you using any kde eyecandy, such as kbfx or taskbar v2? I notice similar problems when I use kbfx > 0.4.8rc2, to the point of embarrassment when I'm trying to show Linux off, because it slows me down so much. (I downgraded and it's fine) Taskbar v2 also slows things down for me a bit, but not to the point that it bothers me. I don't know if there are actual problems with these progs, or if its just my configuration.

mzilikazi - 07.07.2006, 20:29 Uhr
Titel:

Zitat:

Done those but no difference.

Well the df -h command does not do anything except report disc space usage. What is the output?

Run a system process monitor like htop (in a shell) to see what's using your system resources.

shame - 07.07.2006, 23:41 Uhr
Titel:

@ nemesis
I have no extra eyecandy at all at the moment, I was using xcompmgr/kompmgr at first but had to stop using it altogether because kanotix became completely unusable (though it is heading that way anyway).
I have xcompmgr and taskbar 2 running on suse with no graphics card and everything is running much, much quicker than kanotix is without any eyecandy.
I'm also running gnome which is proving slightly quicker than kde but still very sluggish.

@ mzilikazi
I'm unable to access kanotix at the moment but all my distros are on small partitions, the kanotix partition is larger than the other partitions and also has more free space than the others so I don't think that's the cause.
Last time I checked htop I had firefox, synaptic and konsole running, overall cpu jumped to 90 something percent when synaptic was upgrading but never went above 76 any other time and memory usage peaked at 115/512. No single processes seem to be using that much cpu.
All this time just something like minimizing and restoring windows was taking an age and right-clicking on a file was taking several seconds for the context menu to appear.

Crust - 07.07.2006, 23:49 Uhr
Titel:

shame,

I have the same problem, but probably not as bad as you describe. It's been getting slower and slower as time progresses.

I believe that, in my case, it is because of fragmentation.

See this thread:
http://kanotix.com/index.php?name=PNphp ... highlight=

Could you report the fragmentation that you get after running the script?

My fragmentation right now is worse than what I reported in that thread.

-Crust

piper - 07.07.2006, 23:58 Uhr
Titel:

Something is wrong somewhere, or misconfigured somewhere, my AMD 350mhz with 256mb of ram is "not" that slow and sluggish as you describe or cpu hungry, could be another reason the "update gui" is not working right for you either

shame - 08.07.2006, 00:34 Uhr
Titel:

When I had this problem with the previous version I remember that thread but fragmentation wasn't bad at all at the time but after reading of the problem I went with ext3 when I installed easter edition.

I tried it again on kanotix earlier (ran it on / )and got this -

Code:

3.16258318094559% non contiguous files, 1.13052484615793 average fragments.

h2 - 08.07.2006, 19:20 Uhr
Titel:

shame, do you by any chance have gtk2-engines-gtk-qt installed?

shame - 08.07.2006, 22:48 Uhr
Titel:

No, I have gnome-settings-daemon running so gnome apps look right and I first thought this might have been the cause of my problems but stopping it makes no difference.
I have used gtk2-engines-gtk-qt fairly recently and again it made no difference to anything.
It's really getting frustrating not being able to find anything that might be causing it.
Thanks for all the suggestions so far though.

Quite some time ago I had terrible slowdown problems with ubuntu and that seemed to be caused by wrong monitor horiz and vert synch rates in xorg.conf but I've also looked into that and kanotix xorg.conf has the correct synch rates and in fact, copying the details from kanotix xorg.conf actually fixed the problem in ubuntu.

h2 - 09.07.2006, 01:14 Uhr
Titel:

gnome-settings-daemon and gtk2-engines-gtk-qt are highly suspect to me. I had huge issues with gtk2-engines-gtk-qt and now would not install that for any reason again on any system I run. It massively destabized everything, to the point where I was about to give up on linux/kanotix completely. Luckily through mostly devil's help, and a lot of research, I finally managed to pinpoint the issue.

I would not touch anything that claims to do what either of these do, and would consider before anything else apt-get remove --purge both, then see if the situation improves at all. Turning them off is not good enough, totally uninstall them and then see if things improve. Remember, these things are messing with your kde, and they aren't doing it very well. Anything else you've installed that also does something like that would likewise be highly suspect to me.

I simply do not trust especially gtk2-engines-gtk-qt, it did not work, and corrupted my desktops completely while installed. Removing it solved the issue immediately. The symptoms were different from yours, but they basically made my desktop virtually unuseable for quite a few weeks until I figured it out.

Now I avoid this entire class of things, my gnome apps look ok, and that's good enough for me, since they are also totally stable as well now.

To me, this kind of problem you're having is a pretty major one, a core, system issue, and shouldn't be treated lightly, this is after all a failure of the os to function, that's quite different from other types of issues. It would be good to pinpoint this issue more precisely, if I were you, I'd run the manufacturor hard disk test utility, or one of the test utiliities found on something like the ultimate boot cd, to make absolutely certain you don't in fact have any hard disk issues.

I would also run memtest and let it loop through at least 10 times, that takes a few hours, to see if you have memory issues. Do you use mismatched memory, or lowend, cheap stuff? That's also not a good idea in general.

The thing that makes me wonder is that if this were a standard issue with reiserfs you'd think you'd see this problem report all the time, but if your system degraded in only 6 weeks, that's pretty serious. I use mine every day, it's 2005-4, it's on all day, no issues, no slowdowns, / root is on reiserfs, no user data is stored on root, and I use fstab to scan all my user data mounted filesystems on boot every x boots. Most of my data is in ext3 however, so I can read it from windows.

can you post the output of: df -h

I want to see if there are any obvious differences between your setup and my various setups, all of which give / between 5 and 12 gigs, depending on if it's a test or working /

No setup I've done on any box has had the issues you've had, and they are either sata or ide hard drives, various speeds, but all the same more or less in terms of not having the problem you are having. All had issues with gtk2-engines-gtk-qt by the way, it wasn't an isolated issue that was hard to pin down for me, I could reproduce it at will.

I would bet that this is a kde issue, but it's worth testing, when you see the slow down, logout of kde, and log into icewm, and open the same app that was slow in kde. See how it goes. That's how I found the problems I had, and figured out the solution.

Think about the various tweaking software you've installed in this class of things, anything to do with the interface at all, or customizing it. Try to remember if there are products you tend to just install out of habit, or because you like them, which aren't in the base install.

Again, the fact that you've run not one, but two version of this type of software, makes me very suspicous

shame - 09.07.2006, 03:12 Uhr
Titel:

Since I use gnome sometimes as well as kde I can't remove gnome-settings-daemon but I have not had it running in kde for the past day and it's still slow as hell.
I have kde, gnome, xfce and fluxbox installed and have this sluggishness in all of them.
In the previous version kanotix I did install quite a few ubuntu packages which I thought may have caused the problems but I have no ubuntu packages installed now.
I have tried 2 different kanotix kernels and several different debian sid kernels with no improvement.
Regarding interface stuff, I have reverted to default themes and icons in all de's/wm's.
I've run memtest many times and found no problems, I don't have a manufacturers disk for my hard drive but I don't really see how that can be the problem since both kanotix versions I've had the problem with were installed on different disks and suse is now on the old partition and running very well thankyou.
Output of df -h

Code:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/hda1             5.5G  3.2G  2.1G  60% /

sysfs                 5.5G  3.2G  2.1G  60% /sys

tmpfs                 5.5G  3.2G  2.1G  60% /dev/shm

devpts                5.5G  3.2G  2.1G  60% /dev/pts

tmpfs                 5.5G  3.2G  2.1G  60% /dev

/dev/hda4             3.3G  1.6G  1.8G  48% /media/shared

I can no longer use kanotix as my primary os it's so bad, even the missus is now insisting on using suse cos kanotix is so slow.
I don't believe it's a hardware issue since all other os's are running fine and it's obviously not a problem with kanotix itself or everyone would be complaing so I can only imagine I have something installed that's causing it or some configuration issue.

h2 - 09.07.2006, 03:31 Uhr
Titel:

Yes, sounds like you're covering all the possibilities well.

From what you say here, you doing at least one thing I avoid completely:

you have different major windows managers installed. This has not struck me as a good idea, I just stick with the defaults, although I'd like to check out some of the smaller ones, like xfce etc. But I don't trust putting that much stuff on my system, it's completley unnecessary, and simply adds complexity and increases the odds of something not playing well with something else.

The fact that all desktop managers decay is bad, no doubt, but I have to suspect some conflict there.

I decided, from past failures with other linuxes, that when I started doing kanotix, I would not take any extra chances. I've definitely put the idea of installing gnome in that category. If I want to run gnome, then I'll use an install dedicated to gnome, probably debian etch for example, and I will only have gnome installed. Maybe one lightweight windows manager as well just in case, but definitely no e17, no kde, no large manager other than the main one.

Keeping things basic and uncluttered is working very well on all my installs, and makes debugging issues that do come up much easier overall. I also dont' use wireless or a printer by the way, for the same reasons. Result? no headaches, it all works every time I turn it on. No reinstalls, dist-upgrades run fine, very few surprises. Some, but not that many. Well, maybe I shouldn't say uncluttered, stuff is cluttered, but only in more superficial areas, not in the core stuff. The few places by the way where I have mixed too many things at the core are the places where that stuff isn't working. And works on a vanilla install.

And only install stuff in the debian repositories, don't install any other experimental stuff, for average users, I'd say it's fairly safe to say that if a package isnt' in apt, there's probably a good reason for that. Or good enough for me anyway. Nobody knows the skills of programmer x or y, and very few people know what their programs really do, including bugs etc. To me installing stuff from outside of debian repositories is roughly like installing unknown or random windows freeware - maybe it will do what it says, maybe it will destabilize your system, maybe it will install spyware, but you'll never know for sure.

shame - 09.07.2006, 03:46 Uhr
Titel:

I must admit I do tend to install tons of stuff cos I like playing around with different apps.
I have suddenly thought of one thing though, I did have to restore my kanotix install from a backup some time ago after I accidentally deleted the partition it was on. I don't know whether or not it was around the time I started having problems or whether I ever restored my previous install from a backup (I have a nasty habit of deleting the wrong partitions) but it's something to take into account also.

I think I have no other choice but to do yet another clean install.
I'm really into kde now and since I already have gnome and xfce on ubuntu and gnome and fluxbox on slackware I think I'll just stick to using kde on kanotix and see how things go...

h2 - 09.07.2006, 03:51 Uhr
Titel:

I had a similar and very maddening experience with a full restore using rdiff-backup, rdiff somehow managed to find a way to cram all my old data into a hidden compartment in the reiserfs, and then reinstalled over that. The result? Something very much like what you are experiencing. Total slow down, the partition was totally full even though it said it wasn't. Very odd behavior, definitely should not have been possible to have happen, but it did. Solution was to reformat, then restore, then it was all perfect. That's the last major issue I've had by the way. And the backup kept it from being anything more than discovering a very annoying bug in either reiserfs or rdiff-backup or the two together.

But even if this is a reiserfs bug, it seems to only show its face in this particular kind of circumstance.

So reformat partition, reinstall, avoid installing too much stuff for testing and playing, then see if kanotix slows down for you again. If your experience is like mine, this might be the last problem you'll see in kanotix for a long long time.

Lesson: reformat the partition before restoring a full system. And some others.

to me there's enough here to suggest that there may not be a real reiserfs issue, unless you found a way to trigger the same bug as I did, which is entirely likely by the way, it sounds very similar to what I saw, a total slowdown of the system until I deleted and reformatted and then restored. Definitely a significant bug, but I've never seen it again, so I stopped thinking about it.

devil - 09.07.2006, 07:28 Uhr
Titel:

well, reiserfs does fragment. but i cant really feel the slowing down.
h2 makes some really good points there, when it comes to kde & gnome installed on the same install as well as when it comes to using alien for rpm or even install from source. i dont use alien at all and install from source only if there is no other way. right now there is 2 tools installed from source, and things go fine. using checkinstall instead of makeinstall is a good idea here.

greetz
devil

piper - 09.07.2006, 16:22 Uhr
Titel:

Very interesting indeed., I agree with this gtk2-engines-gtk-qt messing things up, I found this out after I think the first post on this forum with improving fonts or something like that, this actually makes things funky on my machine, I have tried "gtk2-engines-gtk-qt" twice on my system. they do not get along Winken

Now all I use is either Freesans or Tahoma both in bold and my fonts look better than windows. I also run XFCE4 and Fluxbox with no problems.

piper - 09.07.2006, 16:30 Uhr
Titel:

shame hat folgendes geschrieben::

You sound like me, installing things, I like trying new things Winken

, but have learned to do one at a time and test it for a good 20 minutes or longer, rebooting to to make sure nothing is funky, anything funky gets a apt-get remove --purge Smilie

You should write down your partitions if you can't keep track (been there done that Smilie

) It really sucks losing things that you had on your drive for years !

Coma - 11.08.2006, 19:40 Uhr
Titel:

It's a shame cuz im gettin the same problem.. Traurig

and its really buggin me
Was just installing some video editing program and then i restarted my computer, sound were gone (was able to repair that with alsaconf) and the harddisk icon that i usualy have on the desktop was gone, and everything was workin really sllloooww.. it almost took a minute to startup firefox.. :S xD.

devil - 11.08.2006, 20:21 Uhr
Titel:

coma,
what video editing? installed how?

greetz
devil

ockham23 - 11.08.2006, 21:00 Uhr
Titel:

coma,
you've reached the point where you should refine your testing approach. I have three suggestions, and I am sure that other forum members will come up with more ideas:
1. Put a copy of the Kanotix iso file on your hard drive, boot off the cd with cheat codes "fromiso=KA*.iso unionfs" and apt-get install as you like.
2. Save a copy of your root partition to a network share with partimage before you do any major upgrade. partimage is on the cd and easy to use; you can even save Windows "C:" drive if it's on a FAT32 partition.
3. Create a second Kanotix installation for testing purposes so you always have your first installation to fall back on. No restrictive Windows license here, you can do as many installs as your hard drive can hold.

Coma - 11.08.2006, 21:04 Uhr
Titel:

well first i tried jahshaka, and followed step by step some instructions in a different forum.

tar xvfz jahshaka1.9a8.tar.gz
./configure
make

but it gave a couple errors.. so then i tried Lives
with synaptic it installed it, but i couldnt find where to get it started, then i started lookin thru some files where the program was installed and looked for the executable file... i double cliked it hoping it would start and nothing happened... so then i thought, maybe i have to restart my computer.. and so i did, und flas! habs schon wieder vermasselt.. Traurig

slh - 11.08.2006, 23:48 Uhr
Titel:

Littering your system with make install is a pretty bad idea on any dpkg/ rpm based system.

Coma - 12.08.2006, 01:33 Uhr
Titel:

yea i did notice it was kind of a huge compilation work and alot of stuff moving around there... i'll have to keep myself down to simple installation apt and package managers.. Auf den Arm nehmen

DeepDayze - 12.08.2006, 19:09 Uhr
Titel:

Better use checkinstall like so

To properly install a program built from source on a Debian/Kanotix system:

unpack the source tarball (.tar.gz) to a directory (preferably a dir in your home dir)
cd to the directory where the program's source was unpacked to
./configure (sets build parameters and checks for files needed to build the program and generates the makefile)
make (build the program's files)
checkinstall (creates a package rather than actually installing the compiled program)

to install the created package:

as root: dpkg -i "name-of checkinstall-created-package" (without the quotes and substituting the name of the deb)

NOTE: If I made an error in this, pls let me know Smilie

Coma - 12.08.2006, 21:16 Uhr
Titel:

Thanks, ill keep that in mind Sehr glücklich

, by the way i started cleaning up some shit and actually i have recovered my old kanotix ( that was a big relief Auf den Arm nehmen

).. just took away some programs that were the problems.. everything back to normal Auf den Arm nehmen

Ill take good care next time i try installing something..

shame - 20.08.2006, 09:41 Uhr
Titel:

When I first started this thread I mentioned that kanotix had become sluggish after about six weeks and after a clean install it became sluggish again a couple of months after. There was a bit of discussion on various things that might be causing my problems and in my last post I mentioned that I was going to do yet another clean install, which I did the very next day.
Well that was about six weeks ago and guess what? Yep, it's starting to become sluggish once again.
It's not as bad as it was... yet, but it really is strange.
This time I've only installed stuff that I know I will use and haven't been experimenting with stuff.
I've kept to just kde, no other window managers or desktop environments.
No gtk2-engines-gtk-qt and no gnome-settings-daemon running.
I switched back to using reiserfs (the first install was reiserfs, the second I tried ext3).
Again, I did a completely clean install, from scratch, nothing kept from the previous install.
And once again, I have been running suse from around the time of the first kanotix install and that is running just as well as the day I installed it (not that I'm trying to make a suse is better point, by the way).
I still can't think what could be causing this but what really keeps bothering me is this 6 to 8 week cycle, what can it mean?

ockham23 - 20.08.2006, 10:12 Uhr
Titel:

Hard to tell. Maybe you're running out of disk space, maybe there's a misconfiguration that's causing millions of hidden error messages that are written into a log file.

A fresh install of Easter-RC4 takes up about 2.5 gigs on your hard drive. Add to that the packages you installed and your data files. Compare the result with the drive space actually used by your system.

Code:

df -h

If the latter number is much bigger than you expected, you should go hunting for large log files.

shame - 20.08.2006, 15:05 Uhr
Titel:

Hmm, the biggest log file I can find is /var/log/messages at 2.2MB and the first entry in it is from of 17th July.
Disk space used is 2.9 gig.

Swynndla - 20.08.2006, 23:38 Uhr
Titel:

Just curious ... two questions:
Have you installed anything that wasn't from the debian sources (and example of which might be google earth etc)?
Also, I'd like to know, have you done a dist-upgrade since your new install?

shame - 21.08.2006, 01:56 Uhr
Titel:

Only things I can remember installing that weren't from the debian sources was a kanotix kernel, spca5xx drivers for my webcam, which were installed a couple of days after the clean install and 3gpwiz (coverts video files to mobile phone format) which also involved compiling the amr enabled, svn version of ffmpeg.

I do dist-upgrades pretty regularly, at least twice a week.

LRC - 21.08.2006, 12:38 Uhr
Titel:

Zitat:

do you by any chance have gtk2-engines-gtk-qt installed?

Thanks for the hint h2. I have noticed that my box was getting sluggish, and I was blaming myself for being a packrat. Got rid of gtk2-engines-gtk-qt and although it didn't seem to change the resource levels used, it sure did change the responses my box had toward my demands.

h2 - 21.08.2006, 18:42 Uhr
Titel:

LRC, thanks for confirming that gtk2-engines-gtk-qt is still apparently problematic. I really wish people would stop recommending that to other people to be honest, the potential issues are simply not worth the headache.

shame - 22.08.2006, 05:08 Uhr
Titel:

WOW! Only a day or so since I mentioned it had started becoming sluggish again, kanotix is has gotten much worse, to the point it was with the previous installs.
In that one day all I've done in browse the net, check my emails and tried some different themes and icon sets to see if they made any difference (they didn't and I'm back to what I was on before).
As a last resort, a couple of hours ago I installed prelink and preload to see if would at least help cut the tens of seconds start time for every app but if anything it's even slower now.
I've spent so much time trying to figure this problem out and I'm not getting anywhere, there doesn't seem to be any reason for it.
Whatever the problem is I don't think I'm going to work it out.
I've done lots of different checks and all other os's are working fine so I don't believe there is a hardware problem.
Obviously there's nothing wrong with kanotix itself or more people would be reporting this but since I'm only getting this problem with kanotix there has to be some conflict somewhere and I hate to say it but I reckon I have to finally give up on kanotix and look for another deb based distro.
What would people recommend as the next best deb distro to kanotix, preferably with kde as default?
I've used mepis before and didn't like it and I've used kde on ubuntu (not kubuntu itself) and there were many problems with it but I've read reports that kubuntu has improved a lot so it might be worth a look.

h2 - 22.08.2006, 07:00 Uhr
Titel:

Zitat:

spca5xx drivers for my webcam, which were installed a couple of days after the clean install and 3gpwiz (coverts video files to mobile phone format) which also involved compiling the amr enabled, svn version of ffmpeg.

The next obvious step seems to be to not install these and see what happens, since I think it's fairly likely that something you are doing is causing the issue.

shame - 22.08.2006, 08:08 Uhr
Titel:

Well I've already removed all traces of the spc5axx driver and the 3gpwiz, along with the ffmpeg I installed with it but no change.
With the previous installs that had the same problem I never installed any of the above so I doubt they are to blame anyway.
I agree it must be something I have done but I just can't imagine what, I've done so little with this install.

slam - 22.08.2006, 09:13 Uhr
Titel:

Zitat:

Installing anything by circumventing the Debian package management system is the beginning of the death of your system integrity, and that's true even more for kernel drivers or other more complex stuff. Debian is not a system where you install manually - just never do that. Your system is compromised above repair, and you should simply re-install to solve your problems.
Greetings,
Chris

Coma - 22.08.2006, 12:49 Uhr
Titel:

I'm also having the problem of running a sluggish Kanotix, but i think the main reason is if you install something by compiling it (make or make install) you're just kinda littering the system. I cleaned up a bit, now its not as sluggish as b4, but I still notice it a bit.

clubex - 22.08.2006, 14:26 Uhr
Titel:

shame: At an empasse you have to try anything. For what it's
worth here's my take on your problem.

This is my first quick look though this thread and two things
stand out for me.

1) In one of your earlier posts you said that Konsole took about
2 secs to start and 6/7 secs for the prompt to appear.

2) Your problem seems to occur whatever application you use.

Now I'm no Sherlock Holmes but the one of the things all GUI
applications have in common are fonts.

How responsive is the system in terminal mode? ie CTRL-ALT-F1

IMHO 2 sec for Konsole to start is normal especially after a
cold boot. But 6/7 secs for the prompt ain't normal. Could it
be that Konsole (and the other applications) are having trouble
finding the correct fonts? I know you've tried fix-fonts but I
remember there were some font problems during the changeover
to Xorg and after some gtk upgrades. Some sym links had to be
changed.

Have you tried

dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config

(my settings are native, always, no)

But, in truth, I smell a bad system link somewhere in your font setup.

Afterthought:
I suppose you did check the checksum after you downloaded
the Kanotix iso?

shame - 22.08.2006, 22:51 Uhr
Titel:

Yea, I always check checksums on every distro I use.
You may have something there, I have never tried dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config on kanotix.
Incidentally, konsole is taking around 5 or 6 seconds to appear at the moment, plus the few seconds for the prompt to appear.
Though when I talk about everything starting slowly it's more the total time it takes to fully appear, for example, I start konqueror and it will take several seconds for the window frame to appear, then the toolbar will fill in bit by bit and then the icons will start appearing one by one. Although, now I think about it, text on toolbars, menubars and folders etc is always the very last thing to appear.
Just to give a better impression of this slowdown on my comp, I did some comparisons earlier today (yes I know I keep comparing to suse but that's just cos it's the only other distro I use with kde).

I switched to identical themes and icons on both (plastik and crystal svg) with identical configurations in every part of kde control centre, same wallpaper and same icons and amount of icons on kicker.

Kanotix:
Konqueror file manager 10 to 15 seconds
firefox 30 to 40 seconds
kpatience 15 to 20 seconds
thunderbird 30 to 40 seconds
gimp 30 to 60 seconds

suse 10.1
konqueror file manager 1 to 2 seconds
firefox 4 to 6 seconds
kpatience 2 to 3 seconds
thunderbird 3 to 5 seconds
gimp 5 to 7 seconds

I know there's a lot more to take into account but it's just to show how bad things are getting.

I can't try the fontconfig thing at the moment but as soon as I get the chance I'll let you know how I get on.

anticapitalista - 23.08.2006, 00:09 Uhr
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Can't solve your problem shame, but why not try a debian sid netinstall. As close to kanotix you will get (or should that be the other way round?)

shame - 23.08.2006, 00:40 Uhr
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Well I tried the fontconfig thing and, alas, still no improvement at all.
A net install of any kind is out of the question since my eciadsl based modem needs drivers installed before I can use it. I've recently tried a couple of new modems and niether would work on linux without patching and kernel rebuilds etc so still no good for a net install. I can't warrant getting a router as I have more important priorities for my cash at the mo.
Unless I can do a net install from within another distro, is this possible? I'm thinking it probably is but I've never looked into it...

It's been mentioned before that installing from source is going to damage the installation but if this is the case then maybe I should steer clear from debian related distros. There are just some things that I need/want that I can only install manually.
For example the spca5xx webcam drivers. The spca5xx modules in the repos don't work for me so I have to install them manually or it means having to boot up a different distro if I want to use webcam which I don't think is right.
If there's an app I want or a driver I need I should be able to install it on any distro I use.
So either way it looks like the end for kanotix for me.
It's a real shame because it was kanotix that really got me into linux in the first place after gentoo (boring) and knoppix (too many problems) nearly put me off altogether.

h2 - 23.08.2006, 02:48 Uhr
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Zitat:

If there's an app I want or a driver I need I should be able to install it on any distro I use.
So either way it looks like the end for kanotix for me.

shame, now I see why you have been having problems, this idea is just not correct. What you have to do when you pick a distro is make some fundamental ground rules that the distro must support. For me, it's being able to upgrade my system essentially continuously. That means apt based debian system.

In other words, you have to adapt yourselves to the strengths and requirements of the distro, the distro doesn't bend itself to yours, that's not realistic. So be clear with yourself about what you need to do, then find a system that does that for you.

This is like saying, as a firefox user, you should be able to install any extensions, in any combination, that you need, no matter how problematic they are, how poorly they integrate with the rest of the extensions and firefox itself, and then to get annoyed when firefox starts failing. Not the best strategy if you ask me, but if it's one you're set on following, then debian is, as you say, not the distro for you.

For you, it sounds like you should look at some thing like slackware, or if you have the patience, gentoo. Those distros are made for people with the requirements you posted, debian isn't, so you picked the wrong one if that's an essential requirement for you. If you pick your hardware to work with the system you use you'll have a lot fewer headaches too, by the way.

And for heaven's sake, spend the 5 or 10 pounds a used router costs, and throw away your modem, nothing is worse than having to use modems of any type to connect to the web, broadband or dialup. Free yourself from at least one headache, value your time the price of a few beer's at the local pub.

shame - 23.08.2006, 03:20 Uhr
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Ok, firstly, I know nothing about routers at all, I enquired about a couple of 20 quid used ones and whether they would work ok on linux and the owners in both cases didn't know what linux was. I've looked in a few independent shops and the cheapest router I found was 65 quid which is too much at this time, I have read that any router will work on linux but when I was about to switch from dial-up I was told in at least three forum threads that any usb modem would work with linux which I've found was wrong.

Next, I'm still curious about this manual installing thing. I've seen a few posts in different threads where you have said this and I would like to know why it causes problems. I'm not disputing the fact, you clearly have more linux knowledge than me and I believe what you are saying I'd just like to understand why it causes these effects, it's something I've never even thought about, let alone looked into.
In the case of the spca5xx driver, it was only replacing files that were already there, though I don't know how much damage the amr enabled ffmpeg might have done but can one package really bring everything down?

Whith the exception of suse, as I want at least one stable os, I generally choose development distros, simply because things do break and the more they break, the more I learn about how things work. I don't particularly want to install anything from source and any app that isn't in the sources I will always search for ready made .deb before I go about installing manually. It's just sometimes it seems to be the only option.

I have tried gentoo on 3 different occasions and each time I always lose patience with all the compiling and fiddliness.
I've also tried slackware, mainly as a challenge to see if I could get everything set up correctly on a more complicated distro, which I did manage and soon got bored.
Maybe I should go somewhere in between like vector. I've always intended giving it a go...

h2 - 23.08.2006, 04:19 Uhr
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debian system are a unified whole, a central database maintains a record of all installed packages, all their dependencies, etc, and handles all issues that arise.

when you introduce outside packages apt is not aware of these, and it may cause issues. I think it depends on the package, and of course, also if the distro maintainers use that package themselves frequently, which realistically tends to translate to better support for an outside package.

for example, if I download the zipped firefox alpha, unzip it, and run it from taht directory, using a new profile, that will never cause any significant issue because it is only a single directory, it just sits there. I run filezilla linux alpha 3 builds that way, for example, but they do not impact the rest of the system in anyway, they are transparent, and to remove them, I delete their directory, that's it, it's gone, except for a listing in the /home directory for its settings.

I think if you find yourself frequently needing to install from source, install extra kernel modules, etc, then you probably should not be using debian. That's my feeling anyway, except for vmware, which I probably should not have installed either in a perfect world, I don't use any non deb components, either kanotix or straight debian. And the system is rock solid, day in and day out, all the installs I've done are solid, no issues at all now. But I've seen how badly just one package can totally screw up this system, in my case it was that gtk-qt-engines junk for example that destabilized kde incredibly badly.

To me it's more about what you use the distro for, at some point, ideally, you use it for work etc, not just play, and at that point, you want the system to be rock solid, and it is for me anyway. I don't know if I know more about this stuff than you, I doubt it, but I do know that after playing with distro after distro for 5 + years, I got sick of crappy distros that kept breaking for reason x, y, or z, then started to understand what apt is all about, and why it's the way to go if you want a solid desktop / server, at least it is for me.

Then it comes down to learning what that apt system requires to work well, consistently, day in and day out. After that, it's just a matter or learning to use the 17,000+ plus tools that debian packages for us. I might make one exception, for very pragmatic purposes, but with some thought before hand, and with a backup too to fall back on just in case.

If you use a dsl modem, then dump it and go buy any used router, I see them at the fleamarket here for $5, that's what I payed for my current one when my old one died, and I really splurged some weeks ago and paid $8 for a wireless router, only b, not g, but that's fine. Routers have been around a long time, they all support pppoe connections, and they do those way better than any software I've ever used. If it's a dialup modem, forget it unless it's one of the very rare true non-winmodems. Linux always works better with normal networking cards, it's built around that, it runs 60% or so of the web after all, that's a lot of hardware, lots of different networking cards, but no modems to speak of.

slam - 23.08.2006, 09:50 Uhr
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And 2 last tips:

1) Before you start your own experiments with building kernel drivers, please simply let us know! We cannot test every single piece of cheap hardware out there with every driver - but you can do that for us. So, if you find a driver working for your hardware, contact us, and we will try to build a clean kernel driver package for it (if the driver is open source and does not conflict with all other already included drivers). That's how Kanotix has become recognizing and working more hardware out of the box than every other distro, and you can help to even improve it.

2) Debian provides more than 17.000 ready made binary packages - that's much more than any other operating system, and of course more than any other Linux distribution. If an application or a tool is not included already, it is most likely that it is either simply crap, or serious stability/security reasons hold it back from being included. So, better go for alternatives instead of insisting on a single not included application. If you really think you found the single pearl in the ocean, again - let us know and we will try to package and test it. Actually that's what we do almost every day, so feel free to join the IRC and propose a package.

You will save yourself a lot of headaches and time, and getting much more productive when following these advises.

Greetings,
Chris

shame - 23.08.2006, 10:45 Uhr
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@ h2
Thanks for clearing that up, I probably should read more rather than bulldozing straight into things. One final question regarding manual installing, what about checkinstall and alien, do these also cause problems?

@ slam
In the past I have compiled a lot of things, often things I think I might want but never actually end up using.
This wasn't the case with my last install, the only things I needed/wanted that weren't in the repos was 3gpwiz, which I have found to be a really useful program which works perfectly for me everytime and has shown no buginess or instability, it might be worth looking into since I don't believe there are any other alternatives to this in the repos, the only downside is having to have a custom ffmpeg. I only found out about it after finding it in the suse repos and the version I installed on kanotix was from kde apps - **censored**

The other thing was of course the spca5xx driver. Now, my webcam has worked with amsn and with the built-in spca5xx kanotix kernel module it worked with kopete also but the debian kernel module wouldn't work and since, at the time, I couldn't use kanotix kernels I didn't see any other option.
Now I can use kanotix kernels I shouldn't need to build this driver again.

So basically, if 3gpwiz and the amr-enabled ffmpeg were added to the debian/kanotix repos I should never need to compile anything.

When I have time I may have to try one last clean install and just approach things differently. Thanks once again for all the patience, help and suggestions throughout this thread.

slam - 23.08.2006, 12:17 Uhr
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The application you mentioned makes usage of tools which are illegal to use in some countries, and it therefore cannot be included in Kanotix. However, there are Debian packages (and also alternatives) around - please ask in the IRC #kanotix.
Greetings,
Chris