slow system
 

hi i am running sarge. my system is a AMD Athlon XP 300+ with 768 ram and a 80 GB Sata HDD, with 256 MB ati graphics card. when i am going to play a dvd/avi/any+other then the movies plays quite slow. though when i open xine to play a movie it gives me a warning message that the system drops many frames. anyideas on what to do?

Did you enable DMA? Install hdparm to get DMA working on your system.Replace hd* with the appropriate devicenames found on your system.

it is sata. so the:
hdparm /dev/sda

???

Bingo :)

<edit: this needs to be here as the forumengine complained about "to short reply" :rolleyes: >

LanParty:~# hdparm /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
geometry = 9729/255/63, sectors = 156301488, start = 0
LanParty:~#

still the system is slow. what is the whole command that i have to type to make it faster?

What does this command show you and what is in the machine for a video card/driver being used for said card.

LanParty:~# hdparm -Tt /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 2068 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1032.09 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 172 MB in 3.01 seconds = 57.11 MB/sec
LanParty:~#

i am running it as root, because the user cannot do that. i do not know if that matters.

Yes root has to run that command. So what model is the ATI card and the driver you are using for it? It seems to me that your system is more than fast enough so it pretty much has to be something along the video driver usage.

Might be worthwhile to check that DRI is working:
grep DRI /var/log/X*

LanParty:~# grep DRI /var/log/X*
/var/log/XFree86.0.log:(II) Loading extension XFree86-DRI
/var/log/XFree86.0.log.old:(II) Loading extension XFree86-DRI
LanParty:~#



regarding my graphics card it is a ATI Radeon 9200 256MB. i used the vesa driver to make it work.

"used the vesa driver to make it work"

That is probably your problem. You shoud use either the integrated "ATI" driver or the proprietary driver from ATI.

Edit: and unless I've mistaken, the proprietary driver currently has some problems with the R200 chip, so the integrated ATi driver should be your best bet.

Should almost be able to use the radeon one in X for that card I think.

Aah, I remembered it was named "ATI" in the install script?
But you are right, "RADEON" driver is what he needs.

ok and how do i install the proprietary drivers or the integrated drivers, in sarge?

To reconfigure the Xserver, give:
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86

And pick ATI when shown the list of drivers.