Linux FAQ

A friend of mine asked me some questions, and I though they might be helpful for other people.

Some how I feel that my linux is slower than windows XP, not the boot up time but the reponses on button click,opening a web page etc..
I am using mac4linux theme , will it consume any CPU bandwidth?

This doesn't necessarily mean that your theme is the reason, there are other factors that can slow down your response time. This could be something like compositing (a program called compiz, that does some sort of animation and effects forlinux desktop), compiz requires some high capabilities, like a good graphics cards... disabling compositing will greatly improve your response time.

Also this could be due to some malfunction in a program that sucks your resources, by experience, firefox sometimes does that especially if there is some flash running. Also firefox leaks some memory (the memory it takes keeps growing and never shrinks with time), this will cause your RAM to be full after sometime, and this will cause your computer to start using the swap space on your Hard Drive, which will really slow down the response time. Both can be solved by closing firefox (Closing the page containing flash sometimes doesn't solve it), please not that when you close a program it doesn't get closed immediately even if its window disappears, it will probably will take some time, 1 to 30 seconds, it might not even close at all. I would rule out the theme as the reason and check compositing and firefox, although this might not be true.

There is something really useful that you can do to have a guess about what is sucking your resources. Right-Click on the pannel (top or bottom of the page), select "+ Add to Panel", then select "System Monitor" (you can use the search field on top), then click "+ Add" once and then close. A new Item will appear in your panel, Right-Click it, Choose "Preferences". Now select all the Check-Boxes, Decrease the "System Monitor Width" to 10 pixels and set the "System monitor update interval" to 500 milliseconds, and click close. This will put a graph for most of your computer/laptop resources in the panel, that will show you what was happening in the last 5 seconds (you can Increase this amount by either increasing the width or the interval, but 5 seconds do really well for me). Now keep your eye on this graph while using your competer/laptop. Check where are the spikes that stay high for a long time, (you can know the colors from the Preferences window). Now if you want more details, for example something uses your processor, or memory. Give a single-click to the graph, which will open the System Monitor. There you can see bigger graphs, but now let's go to the processes tab. There you can see each process running and its resource usage. If you press the field "CPU" (or Memory) from the table this will sort the processes according to their processor (Memory) usage. Now you can see clearly what is sucking up your resources and handle it.

I also just wanted to know the best softphone available for Linux... I came across some phones on web, the quality of the audio is not so good..... can you please suggest any?

I understand you need a SIP phone, which uses the SIP protocol to make calls through a VOIP provider.. Personally I couldn't get any to run correctly.. But there is some phones that people say are really good like Ekiga for example.

Also please feel free to ask about anything you would like about linux or other things at anytime, I am not a very terribly good expert, but at least I know some stuff.
Also, with linux googling your problem and reading some forums usually does it. If the problem is somehow extreme, you could join an IRC channel related to your problem and ask there, there is usually somebody to help.