[NCLUG] Debian Question

[Chad Perrin]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 05:42:40PM -0700, David Braley wrote:
> 
> Now it doesn't matter what newer distro I load onto the machine, Ubuntu, 
> Fedora, Suse, Mandrake, they all take about 2 minutes to come up! Some 
> of them even longer. These new distro's make my machine seem old and 
> tired. Just for the curious, my old and tired machine is a:

Actually, it *does* matter.  You just happen to be choosing all the
distributions that default to very heavy, high resource suckage installs
without (in some cases) as easy a means of getting a minimal install up
to speed as something like Debian or FreeBSD even if you *do* figure out
how to do that distribution's version of a "minimal" install.

Fedora's pretty good, last I checked, but still ends up looking pretty
hefty compared to Debian's minimal install when you do a minimal Fedora
install.  Last I checked, SuSE and Mandriva weren't quite so good on that
front.  I don't think Ubuntu's even Ubuntu without all the
spaghetti-tangle of dependencies.


> 
> So I did a minimal install of Debian. Put fluxbox on for my WM, and 
> WAMO! I can get to my desktop from grub in about 15 seconds! And... it's 
> not just the booting up that is faster. Applications like Firefox, 
> Thunderbird, and even OpenOffice.org loads much faster as well. My 
> Firefox loads in less than one second. In Kubuntu, Firefox loads in 
> about 4 seconds.

Yet another reason I preferred Debian over other Linux distributions (and
still do).


> 
> I like this new speed. Makes me feel like I have a new machine. ;-) 
> That's when I got concerned about the long term effects of updating the 
> system, hence, the reason for the original post.
> 
> I know it sounds like I am just complaining and I need to learn some 
> patience, but it does bring up some interesting questions. Why the hell 
> is Linux getting so Huge? And why does it take so damn long to boot up? 
> Is it the Desktop system (Gnome, Kde, Fluxbox, well, technically, 
> Fluxbox is a window manager) that slows the loading of apps?

No . . . you sound like someone that is having fun with a new system and
trying to figure out the gotchas before they getcha -- not just a
complainer.  It's a good thing to be prepared and interested.

GNOME and KDE definitely slow things down.  So do the dependencies
imposed by certain distributions' compilation and distribution policies.
I think there are more fundamental issues at work, though.  I just can't
point to specifics very well, because I haven't been following Linux
kernel development of late.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Kent Beck: "I always knew that one day Smalltalk would replace Java.  I
just didn't know it would be called Ruby."