Whatever soundcard you have Alsa drivers will deliver better performance and if like me you have the Yamaha 724 the Alsa drivers are nearly as good as those provided by Yamaha for Windows. You will of course have to compile them for your system but don't let that deter you. Its a simple matter of three commands. The alsa drivers are available at http://www.alsa-project.org/
Those used to scrolling with their mouse wheel/s will not like Linux if they can't scroll. The good news is you can but it is not set up by default. Add the following line to your XF86Config file in /etc/X11/ in the mouse section "ZAxisMapping 4 5" (obviously without the quotes though in Xfree 4.01 you would have to enclose the numerical values in quotes) If this doesn't work visit the Linux scroll wheel homepage at http://www.inria.fr/koala/colas/mouse-wheel-scroll/ set up by a curiously named fellow called Colas Nahaboo.
By default the hard disk is not configured to perform
at its optimum and in most cases the difference can be dramatic.
DMA, 32 bit IO and
multiple sector transfers are disabled by default and you
should enable them at the earliest this is of course presuming you have
a relatively new hard disk that support these features. As a test you
should benchmark your hdd before and after you
change the settings just to see the difference tweaking can do to
your system. The utility to change the settings is
hdparm and you can run it from an
xterm or the console but for a permanent
solution append the command to your rc.d local
file in /etc/rcd. Before you
use hdparm read the documentation
carefully. Its a powerful utility and misusing it can trash your
disk. First run hdparm with the
-i option to get the
info on your hdd, then benchmark it without the
changes by running
hdparm -Tt /dev/hda. Then run
hdparm -c 1 -d 1
-m16 -k 1 /dev/hda
hdparm -d 1 (sets
dma to on)
-mx(this sets
multiple transfers where x represents the
maximum (in my case 16) that your
hdd allows – running
hdparm with the -i option gives
you the maximum that your hdd allows )
-c 1 (sets 32 bit io) and
-k 1 keeps the setting. In my case the data
transfer shotup from a mere 3.16 to
16.8 Mb/sec!
A file system driver for the ext2 filesystem for Windows, ext2fs is available from its homepage http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/ giving you the added convienience of reading your Linux partitions from within Windows.