Re: Accelerated X - and my first expereinces with Linux....


Subject: Re: Accelerated X - and my first expereinces with Linux....
From: something (macuser666@home.com)
Date: Sun Sep 05 1999 - 21:23:05 MDT


I have a simular complaint. YellowDogLinux Champion 1.1 is the *first* Linux
that has been fully usably that I've ever used and installed myself. I have
tried a total of four distributions including YellowDog on both my PC and
Mac, and this is the first to boot into the GUI that was at least
customized. The screen fit nicely, unlike Redhat and it connected to the net
unlike Caldera (due to the lack of a needed 3Com ethernet driver, as I use a
cable modem). However, now that I've had time to toy with it - I have a few
gripes. First off, there seems to be no acceration. And while most
applications launch really really fast, the GUI seems to react slowly to a
lot of tasks that the Mac O.S. is super quick with. Such as when I move the
pointer up on the GNOME paw start-button looking thing, the highlight that
follows usually trails behind quite a bit - and refreshing on the screen is
horribly slow. The GUI seems fairly stable, and although Linux itself hasn't
yet crashed on me often I am kicked out of GNOMe and into the command line.
One thing that bugs is that sometimes (very very often in the case of the
MP3 player and Netscape) a application will lockup and I don't know the
keyboard combination to quite it, and I will wait until I'm asked of I wish
to close it. Also, last but certainly not least (and I think this is a Gnome
thing, I don't remember XFree86 or KDE on the PC doing this) if I move the
cursor to any edge of the screen I'm moved to another virtual desktop (a
feature I like, but I'd rather select it on my own accord on the taskbar
then be sent there by the posstion of my mouse), and often I'm merely trying
to scroll down on a webpage on Netscape and I'm thrown into another desktop.
As a newbie, I can't currently recommend Linux to anyone wanting a
replacement for Windows on the grounds that the GUIs don't seem to be that
well integerated and regardless of the distribution I am often tossed out of
it into the command-line. It is, as a whole, increadibly stable and fast.
Even though scrolling on Netscape was a huge pain as I had to wait for the
screen to refresh, it loaded websites like lightening and rendered them
considerably faster then Mac O.S. I'm running on a rev. B iMac with 96 megs
RAM, with my 4 gig HD partitioned into two 2 gig HDs. I have a total of 256
megs swap and plenty of free disk space for apps left. And this reminds
me...could someone run a list of LinuxPPC/YellowDog compatible Linux apps
somewhere in the same way that FreeBSD does or even Be O.S.? Thanx!

~Christopher

P.S. What is it about Netscape on Linux (I've noticed this on all
distributions on many different machines running Linux that I've used) that
it takes forever to launch while other larger apps, like GIMP, launches
amazingly fast and often after a previous crash it seems to be locked up
from the start, with only the stop button showing and everything else grayed
out...thank god for memory protection, for the rest of the GUI is responsive
and the crashing of Netscape doesn't bother anything else, for when this
happens on my Windows 95 machine often it will take the O.S. down with it.

> Hi.
>
> I am running the YDL CS1.1 distribution on a new PowerBook G3 (Bronze
> Keyboard). Video is the ATI Rage LT Pro with 8 MB SDRAM. On boot, only 3
> MB is detected and there is no acceleration. Not all that surprising
> given that the documentation that accompanied the distribution stated
> that an XFree86 based ATI frame buffer driver was not yet available.
> However, I was curious as to whether this is still the case. I have
> tried newsgroups and FAQs and have found discussions involving
> everything from patches and kernel arguments to startx options and
> sacrafical rites that are supposed to offer accelerated X. Well, maybe
> not that extreme, but pretty close. Most of it seems highly
> inconsistent, probably due to lack of context such as which PowerBook,
> XFree vs Xpmac, which distribution, etc.
>
> Could anyone supply either an explanation or links to information that
> coherently cover the status of accelerated X for the new PowerBooks
> using XFree86 ala YDL CS1.1? If so, it would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Jim Cole
>



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