High CPU usage, unusable

[mswade0]

Hello,

First, very frustrated. I installed v 64bit 2016-2 onto a HD in a USB enclosure and that was fine, though there were a ton of updates which I ran with apt-get and that was all good, decent performance, a decent amount of work. Now, the next day I set up a router and a two computer network to play with and there is excessive CPU use from gnome-shell. The system is unusable, but it was fine after the install and update, now it's spinning its wheels and I can barely open System Monitor to figure out what's going on, did I mention frustration. I turned off window effects or some such thing but that didn't do it.

My hardware is old, Dell D620 w/ 4MB ram but the performance was fine after the install and updates so it's not the hardware in my view. So is it I've installed on an ATA drive in a USB enclosure, my graphics card isn't up to GNOME (3 is it? but it ran okay yesterday)?

I was hoping to work with this today but all I've done is waste my time. I have no disks with me to burn another ISO.

I was hoping perhaps someone had some insight as to how to fix this installation before I trash it and install another desktop environment, whether I should take the HD out of the enclosure and just swap it in and out of the laptop, not so convenient but an option.

Thanks,

-- Mark

[clone]

Hopefully you have 4gb not 4mb ram? 😆 take a look@ http://www.linlap.com/dell_latitude_d620 . Perhaps setting up dual boot with grub on the internal hd will help. You will never get much done swapping hds in and out. It is always tempting to put a linux os on slower machines, like Puppy. The full Kali image/install is not such a lightweight resource user. You could also try a "roll your own" less resource hungry Kali : http://docs.kali.org

Anyway, some things to look at. Good luck

[mswade0]

Hopefully you have 4gb not 4mb ram? 😆 take a look@ http://www.linlap.com/dell_latitude_d620 . Perhaps setting up dual boot with grub on the internal hd will help. You will never get much done swapping hds in and out. It is always tempting to put a linux os on slower machines, like Puppy. The full Kali image/install is not such a lightweight resource user. You could also try a "roll your own" less resource hungry Kali : http://docs.kali.org

Anyway, some things to look at. Good luck

Thanks for replying,

Yes 4GBs of ram of which it seems 3.2 are available, the rest for graphics I guess. I'm thinking I will reinstall on the external ata drive in the USB enclosure and try again. I had some problems with an app called Package Updater during a couple of previously attempted installs. It kind of hung and never completed and seemed to leave the system unstable so I reinstalled and used apt-get update and upgrade but then tried Package Update again which showed updates apt-get did not for some reason. This time it completed but then there was no sign of that app on the system any longer so I'm thinking it's the cause of my problem. I'm going to reinstall and stay away from it and see what happens. I'll post again when I know.

-- Mark

[clone]

Take a look at step 13 in the Kali hard disk install docs.kali.org/installation/kali-linux-hard-disk-install . Did you accidentally select the No option? Unsure about the High CPU usage being related though.

[mswade0]

Take a look at step 13 in the Kali hard disk install docs.kali.org/installation/kali-linux-hard-disk-install . Did you accidentally select the No option? Unsure about the High CPU usage being related though.

I selected yes to access the mirrors.

I've been through this a few times now and what I have now is an up to date working installation using XFCE. What happens is I install the GNOME version and it works fine but apt-get upgrade lists something like 1010 packages to update and 200 some odd held back. If I proceed with that upgrade the installation will still run fine but only until a restart, then it just grinds its nose in the dirt. So, somewhere in all those updates GNOME develops a great aversion for my hardware and it's not worth it figuring out what, maybe at a later date, I doubt it though, as I have a functioning install with XFCE.

My main HD has Ubuntu 14.04 installed, using GNOME, but in classic mode I think it's referred to, as I begin to have some glitches with Unity. I don't upgrade past 14.04 because I start having problems with hardware compatibility.

Anyway, thanks to all for there time spent reading and responding. Its time to stop playing with the install and start using what I have.

-- Mark