Fedora Screen Size problem

[tbyers31]

Hi,

I just installed Fedora Core on an older system (Duron 950, 484m ram, 4 gb hd, ATI Rage 4mb video). It's a fresh install with no other OSes.

My problems so far:

1) running Mozilla freezes the machine completely. I've searched the forums and have found some other cases but they don't apply to my situation (e.g. 1: XMMS causing freezes; I made the change to no effect; 2: Old Mozilla version path references; I only have the version that came with the original install). In my case I can type 3 or 4 characters of a URL and it dies, forcing me to use the power button to get out (Ctrl+Alt+Bksp doesn't work).

2) I installed at 800x600 resolution for Xwindows, but when I change the parameters from KDE or Gnome Display control, the change affects my Fedora login only, not the Gnome/KDE desktop. 800x600 is too small for some of the stuff I'm running... the screens are too big and I can't move them to where I can get at the OK/Cancel buttons.

3) When I select Logout from Gnome/KDE, my screen goes blank and I'm dead in the water. I think I should return to the fedora login screen or something, but I get nothing but a black screen.

4) Is my ATI Rage 4mb card too ancient for running Xwindows? It takes forever to get Gnome/KDE to recognize my screen clicks for bringing up menus, loading apps, etc. Is my harddrive too slow? It's almost unusable at times because sometimes it may take 5 to 20 secs after a mouseclick to have the system display a splash screen or menu to even let me know what I've done.

I'm a newbie and at the edge of my skills with Linux, here, so any help would be appreciated.

Tim

[Icarus]

That is too slow, that machine should be fairly responsive

Check the output of dmesg, look for any problems there. Could be a hardware problem...maybe DMA isn't enabled? That could cause lots of problems (or enabled and not supported)

[tbyers31]

Thanks for the tip... I'll run this tonight.

[tbyers31]

I think I've discovered why my system is so slow... I realized I was reading my memory stats wrong. My system has 48mb ram, not 484mb! The system is made of old parts, and the ram was from an old Pentium II system. I didn't read the boot up info properly. In Xwindows I brought up a system monitor and discovered that I seem to be hammering the swap file, which explains why everything seems to make the hard drive spin. I'll be looking for some memory to replace this and see if I can confirm this.