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LINUX LESSONS

by George Martin

Start ı Booting Up ı Getting the Best Performance ı Final Deduction ı Sources and PDF

GETTING THE BEST PERFORMANCE

One observation I made was that the system seemed slow. So, I ran some tests. It took 1 min. 46 s to load Netscape V.4.51. That seemed like a long time to me. I had 16 MB of RAM, and I added another 16 MB for a total of 32 MB. Netscape now loaded in 58 s, taking approximately half as long. And if you assume that a 200-MHz Pentium is four times as fast as a 100-MHz 486, 58 s is right in the ballpark. Load up your browser on your system, and I bet your performance is in line with these numbers. Iıve got a 200-MHz Pentium II with 128-MB RAM, and I load Netscape V.4.76 in 22 s.

One of the applications available is a task manager. The task manager lets you view the running applications by user, calling source, or as a CPU and memory load. With 16 MB of DRAM, the system loaded up 20,966 KB of memory before Netscape and 28,700 KB after. Both are larger than the 16 MB of installed memory, so swapping takes place to run all the code. With 32 MB of DRAM, the readings were 24,904 KB before and 42,196 KB after loading Netscape. So, although the system was using more memory, the memory management routines made for a more efficient system. What a pleasant surprise!

Although both installations stumbled over the graphics card identification, after I was up and running, adding the modem was a piece of cake. The modem card was installed as COM3, and I selected that device from the list and had a modem. The dialer was also straightforward; I simply followed the examples in the Caldera manual. Perhaps I was more comfortable with all that printed material and thatıs why I prefer this version. Another surprise was that the modem had trouble running at 28.8 KB in WIN95 but ran at 33.8 KB under Linux (maybe because of the better drivers and a cleaner OS).

I set up two users on the system and logged in as one of them. Then I started customizing the operating system and recompiling. I kept up until I blew away anything that resembled Linux. "Thank you. Thank you very much." However, I could reboot into the other user, and of course, I could boot into the root and reinstall the corrupted user.

You get spreadsheets, word processors, browsers, calculators, viewers, clocks, and games. Remember Asteroids? Well, I have a vintage-looking version running in the year 2001. Itıs great! Oh, I forgot moon phases, calendars, appointment books, mouse odometers, world maps, and too many more to mention. Plus, C++ editors and compilers.

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