Xubuntu on Thinkpad 600: Sluggish and dragging

[Shurato]

Hi all

So I decided to install Xubuntu 7.10 (alternate install CD) on a Thinkpad 600 because it is more lightweight than the normal Ubuntu distros.
While the Installation went fine after two attempts (disabling ethernet) and managed to display the screen in XGA, the system itself is just slow, sluggish and dragging.
The Thinkpad 600 has a 300 Mhz Pentium II CPU and 224 Mbyte RAM available which to me is supposed to be quite a nifty performance for low resource requirements operating systems.
Opening a simple thing like a terminal window takes a whooping 5 seconds!! And after entering an command it takes about 2 secs to start executing it. Not to mention opening Open Office, it takes about 30s. Scrolling up and down a text document in Open Office is sluggish well it's all just too slow for being a PII 300 Mhz.

I was wondering what tweaks there are? And what I could add/alter for the NeoMagic Graphics adapter in the xorg.conf file in case the graphics accelerator would not be used properly?

Another issue I wonder about the performance is if the memory would cause that; I have two banks of 128 Mbyte @100Mhz, the notebook having already 32 Mbyte built in and its memory being clocked @66 Mhz otherwise, it subtracts the 32 from the total 256 extension built in. So it has 224 Mbyte availabe instead; if this would cause the sluggishness for any reasons?

Any help and advices are greatly appreciated.

[Thomcat]

Try changing the color resolution from 24-bit to 16-bit. X is only accelerated in 16 bit for the neomagic driver.

[Thomcat]

Btw, I installed Xubuntu 7.10 on a Thinkpad 570 with a p2 366mhz processor and 192mb of ram. It runs just fine. Given that this system is comparable to yours, there may be other issues. Try lowering the color depth and see if things improve.

[John H]

How does one change the color depth?

[Shurato]

Thanks for the advices as for decreasing the colour depth, this was an imperative thing to do for me since obviously the tp600 doesn't support 24 Bit XGA natively, it would only show a resolution of 800x600. The NeoMagic Display Adapter just offers 2 Mbyte of Video Memory.

Btw, I installed Xubuntu 7.10 on a Thinkpad 570 with a p2 366mhz processor and 192mb of ram. It runs just fine. Given that this system is comparable to yours, there may be other issues. Try lowering the color depth and see if things improve.

Yay - the Thinkpad 570 is also a machine I have. Nice device, I like it. Lightweight and still nice and large screen to comfortably work with it. Still need to install some Linux on it.

How does one change the color depth?

There's this file called xorg.conf in /etc/X11 and in the section "screen" you need to change the value for "DefaultDepth" to 16 I think. And in the subsequent modes below you can remove or comment out that entry having 24 as colour depth. That's how I did for my tp600.