Why Is Debian Slow?

[Capn_Fish]

http://www.kegel.com/crosstool/

That ought to do it.

[dlj0]

Ahh, that would make sense.

Well, it would make sense were it true.  But the debian kernels kicking around for the Z are not full-featured with lots of things you don't need on a Zaurus, but are specifically compiled for the Zaurus.  In fact, I seem to recall that at least some of them _were_ Angstrom kernels.  All the scripts are set up specifically for the things you would want on your Z as well, so IIRC there were not a bunch of extra services or logging.  

Frankly, my experience was that debian was essentially the same speed as Angstrom.  Now, maybe I whittled down some memory hogs, such as blacklisting  the sound modules since I didn't use them (maybe that's part of it), and used a lightweight window-manager (I used xfce4 and, later, icewm).  

The biggest differences were the ease of upgrade and availability of packages, both strongly in favor of debian.

[Capn_Fish]

My system is about as lean as I can make it, and it still feels slower than Angstrom. I'm still thinking that the difference in optimizations may be the cause of it.

[scottlfa]

I found that Debian on the Z is noticeably slower than some custom distro's for the Z such as PdaXrom.  Though it is close to PdaXrom R198-SP8 in speed, I am thinking the speed edge there is nand vs sd card related.  Your choice of WM matters alot and services etc that are running when the system loads.

I use rcconf to control load up of service from the console and presently use E17 as my wm (though lxde is pretty light too).

Been using Debian basically since I was first able to muddle through the install process.

[Capn_Fish]

I would agree with you, but Angstrom also runs from the internal MD, and it was fine with no slowdown.

[scottlfa]

Still consider angstrom to be a Z specific distro (may need to change my opinion of it), where as debian arm is for a broader base of devices and not optimized for the Z.  So too me a side by side would be partially hampered.

JMO.

[scottlfa]

Tried Angstrom again ... and nothing seems to have changed, various issues that I would consider very unpolished in the feeds.  Faster yes, more useful ... not for me ... ymmv but having no preset apps and going to the feeds just to get the basics is for the birds.

I admit speed is an issue with debian eabi, but its reliable and comes set with linux basics at the get go.  Recently tried Andromeda EABI and it seems significantly faster than the basic eabi I was using.  It was a breeze to install and the lxp wm is light enough to be very responsive.  Apps load in a reasonable time frame too.  Just an update