i thought since i was playing with antiX 8.5 for a few days, i would just write something from my experience. this serves as my future reference, perhaps it might be useful for newer users who happen to visit this forum and are considering trying antiX OS.

i tried several computers and laptops, just summarise here:
1. a 6-year old laptop, NEC versa, Pentium 1.8G, 800M Ram, intel wireless pro 2200.
2. a 7-year old compaq desktop ( disposed by ex-owner due to too slow in XP), pentium 2.4G, 1G Ram, ATI display card, SIS wired network card
3. an old , self assembled, celeron 2G, 1G Ram, this is slow computer due to celeron CPU
4. another old self assembled, pentium 1.8G, 800M Ram, this is faster than item 3 above
5. a relatively new Dell computer, i3, 2.93G, 4G Ram, ATI display with 1G ram, very fast computer running win 7 dual boot with other linux OS
however, this has a Broadcom 57788 gigabit Network card and this one is a killer to many distros with kernel 2.6.33 version
6. Acer Aspire L5100. It has AMD Athlon 64-bit CPU, 1G Ram, ATI display card, came with vista but ex-owner did not want this due to very slow ( really, it took 10 minutes to start, 15 min to shutdown, no wonder the owner do not want it.
I did not really bother to repair or reinstall vista because i too suffered similar issue on a relatively new Dell laptop.
Thus, i just erase all hard disk and give it for my Linux experiment. Actually this computer is quite fast for many testings on various distros

7. an old Dell Inspiron 640M laptop, intel T2300 1.66G with 1G Ram

The good thing for me to say is, all of them work!, i broke record of having one Linux OS that get ALL of them to work! out of the box.
Often some OS has sound issue, some have display issue, some has wireless issue, some have wired internet issue, etc.

Some common observation:
a. antiX 8.5 Live CD boots up very fast. Typically it took just few minutes. The faster ones are just little over one minutes!
b. for all the wired network card , all worked out of the box, including item 5, probably due to the kernel is at 2.6.32 version.
c. all sound work out of the box. on top of this, the keyboard shortcut also work ( such as fn left arrow, fn right arrow , fn F10 on laptop for sound volume and mute), this is very nice considering many distros will not have them working out of the box
d. display all work with good detection and proper resolution
e. wireless : this is one of the pain on many distros. many of them have trouble getting the wicd working. including the antiX's wicd, it did not work. The Mepis 8.5 Live CD also cannot get wireless working with wicd.
Then i intuitively looked for network and find several programs on Live CD. i saw several wireless program available, so i tried Ceni and it worked...on both item 1 NEC laptop and item 7 Dell laptop.
So having several wireless programs becomes an advantage, at least to me.

Next, i decided to install onto two computers for testing for longer time.

First is to install on item 1, NEC laptop, to my pleasant surprise, it installed in less than 10 minutes! another record.
My earlier fastest installation was from one Linux OS based on Slackware, 12-13 minutes.

Now this laptop can power up and ready around 50 seconds, including my keying in user name and password. It shuts down in about 12 seconds..
This compares very well when i was using win xp, startup in 2-3 minute, shutdown 1.5-2 minutes.
I am using it for last two days, so far so good.

Second, since i like the speed, i would like to compare with some other distros on the slowest computer, item 3, celeron 2G.
What i did was to compare CPU usage/RAM usage/SWAP with a few tests. These are just for my own reference and this does not represent anything , i did that because of my common application of surfing net, watch record movies, watch youtube , listening to music , read email, opening word files/PDF files, etc. typical files format are .flv,mp3,mp4 ( HD),mkv, rmbv...
Through my testing, the most CPU consumed tasks for this old and slow computer is playing HD MP4, CPU usage hit 100%!, and for some distros, this computer could not even play HD MP4, it has sound, but video either stopped or lagged badly.
Second highest CPU usage is when watching Youtube, CPU typically running 80-100%.. These showed how slow celeron CPU is especially when compared with Pentium. Celeron 2G is much slower than Pentium 1.8G.
As such i knew this celeron computer is not suitable for playing HD video due to its hardware limitation.
While this test might be considered not suitable, but i found this is useful for me to 'crack' some distros, what happened is when CPU hit 100%, the player might begin to behave strangely, even crash ( hang up) or went back ( keep switching on/off ).
While stable OS would just slowly run and not crash or hang up, such as Win XP , Ubuntu, LinuxMint, etc.
Perhaps someday this compute might become just a server running Linux OS.

So i am happy for now on antiX 8.5, and i hope to use antiX for longer time and learn to add some functions i would need but now yet installed such as networking.
Of course i shall need a lot of help from this forum because i am not familiar with antiX and still too new to the world of Linux OS.

Once again, thank you for this wonderful OS, it is fast and just works.

I thought two things:
1- you could try using cpulimit to limit the CPU usage for the video player (
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2- you could try with a different video player - which one did you use? antiX comes with Gxine and MPlayer I think, you could also try VLC or a Gstreamer based one like Totem.

Nice post wayne128,

Yes ceni is nice, you might want to look here about wicd:


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also there is good general info here:


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Welcome to antiX, lots of good folks here

cheers,
ohh

hi ohh, thanks for your links and reply

in fact some other distros used wicd and i had no trouble getting wireless using wicd. Usually a list of wireless network will show up, what i need to do is just enter password and click connection..somewhat intuitively..

However, on antiX 8.5, it did not give me the list of wireless network. Perhaps the intel ipw2200 is not even loaded ( since i did not see it being able to scan networks). but i do not know how to troubleshoot and repair.

On Mepis 8.5, the pop up windows is the same as what i used to see from other distros, but i still could not get wireless after entering password/SSID, etc. Upon many tries i think i could get wireless once after some 6 to 7 trials. However it runs too slow for my liking.

anyway, Ceni comes to rescue, perhaps it wants me to stay with antiX, __{{emoticon}}__

secipolla wrote:I thought two things:
1- you could try using cpulimit to limit the CPU usage for the video player (
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url was:"http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20100816"
linktext was:"http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20100816"
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)
2- you could try with a different video player - which one did you use? antiX comes with Gxine and MPlayer I think, you could also try VLC or a Gstreamer based one like Totem.

hi secipolla,
2. the one i used is the default Gnome Mplayer.
it still would play the video inspite of being slow response, and sound is OK
when i played with Gxine, video is similarly slow, sound has problem, after several seconds it become muted.

vlc: other distros: big ones usually does not play well on MP4,. sound normal, but poor video.
using Puppy, vlc playd quite well. Slackware based distros also played better with vlc.

since the last two days i had problem on apt-get , i could not load samba, vlc, etc thus could not try vlc.