[Techtalk] thanks for all the help!

Akkana akkana at shallowsky.com
Fri Aug 2 12:37:22 EST 2002


Dave North writes:
> semi-regularly, and the big startup hit for me is kudzu. Nice feature and
> all that, but both redhat and mandrake dwell there for quite a while.
> 	(Sam: that's the "test for new hardware" phase of booting).

Agreed.  Checking for new hardware is the longest part of booting.
But that's true of Windows too (at least, it used to be).

I periodically tell myself that I'll turn off kudzu-at-boot-time.
Then I plug something in and Redhat discovers and configures it and
I think gee, that's so nice, maybe I'll leave it in a while longer ...

Aside from that, I can cut the boot time nearly in half by turning
off services I don't need (as other people have already described).

> > I agree with this, but I would start with Mandrake 8.2 (says the woman
> > running Red Hat :).
> 
> Let me drop in a small apostacy here and say I think RedHat 7.3 is
> far easier and cleaner than Mandrake 8.2 (the AOL of linuces :).

Since Sam's current first priority is to get USB devices working, it's
worth mentioning that Redhat 7.3 has *really good* support for USB in
its kernel.  I had been running my own custom-built kernels full of
extra patches to make USB stuff work ... but under 7.3 I found I can run
nearly all my oddball USB devices with Redhat's standard kernel.  Redhat
may not be as good as Mandrake or SuSE at giving you GUI configuration
programs, but it is really good at running USB devices.  

It may be that the latest Mandrake and SuSE versions are just as good.
Whichever distro you choose, running a recent distro will *definitely*
help with USB devices.  You can get by with an old distro if you're
willing to build a custom kernel; that's not as difficult as it sounds,
but it's not something you'd want to bother with as a newbie.

Re usb mice: When I boot Redhat with a usb mouse attached,
kudzu detects it, asks me if I want to configure it, then modifies
/etc/X11/XF86Config-4 appropriately, so that the next time I run X
it uses the USB mouse.  (In my case that wasn't quite what I wanted:
I wanted to be able to use the PS/2 mouse or trackpad and the USB
mouse or tablet simultaneously, which takes a little extra work;
but for Sam's purposes, it would have been perfect.)
I haven't tried a usb keyboard.

	...Akkana



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