I was trrying to install ubuntu on my k6-2 333 laptop with 192mb ram. Recent versions wouldn't even boot so I tried 6.06 (or was it 8.04?)

The live cd booted to gnome but then it stalled. Every click took minutes to register and the cd was spinning indefinitely. I gave up.

I still use Gentoo on a Celeron 333Mhz ( this thing ) and it _flies_*.

*Compared to the same release on the 700 Mhz Raspberry Pi or the N900.

And the difference is by at least an order of magnitude in build times.

The simple NBench benchmark shows that you can compare the memory/integer performance of the N900's OMAP3430 to a Desktop PC PIII or K7 with the same or even higher clock frequency: http://www.tux.org/~mayer/linux/results2.html.

FP performance is a different point but I'm not shure if the compiler/benchmark really used VFP/hardfloat. Also gcc version seem to have a great influence as later versions give optimized and better results.

hi guys i don't if this is related to this thread but I would like to share a big improvement for slow n900. Yesterday I was unable to install any apps on my device it said libncursesw5 missing library but after i doing apt-get install libncursesw5 my N900 amazingly silky smooth. I am not joking and I don't know I am not a linux freak maybe this was the cause of slowliness. Everything is smooth I am using this thump latest one and cssu testing latest. So thanks Maemo

Well. One thing I can tell you 100% is that ncurses has absolutely nothing to do with how fast or slow your N900 may be. You must have done something else.