A couple of other quick questions

lumix · 03-09-2007, 03:42 PM

Can anyone point me quickly to the Kde configuration that:

1. makes my kmenu pop up all transparent and pretty. (I had this before and can't find it now).

2. undoes animation of tool-tips. TOO slow.

Also, any suggestions for tweaking my radeon or environment in general to make "composite" transparency of windows perform better? My 1.2 Ghz machine crawls just performing simple desktop operations (e.g. menu drops, window move and scroll, etc).

Thanks.

General Failure · 03-09-2007, 03:52 PM

control center > appearance > style

Edit:

Quote:

Originally Posted by lumix

My 1.2 Ghz machine crawls just performing simple desktop operations (e.g. menu drops, window move and scroll, etc).

You do have ati drivers installed and running? Your box should perform fairly good normally...

lumix · 03-09-2007, 04:35 PM

...all purdy and see-through again.

I'm using the "radeon" driver that (I believe) comes with knoppix, and possibly Deb in general. My homework indicated that the open source version is thought to be significantly faster.

As such, I changed the driver in Xorg.conf to "radeon."

Did I do good?

Thanks for the info, btw.

General Failure · 03-09-2007, 11:31 PM

As your box is slow on graphical operations like you said I strongly recommend trying the proprietary ati driver, to see if it just might be better than the OS one. I have no experience with ati as I have an nvidia card so I cannot give you any other advice.

jimmy512 · 03-10-2007, 02:02 PM

I think that the problem with using the ATI "official" driver is that you do not get Direct Rendering at the same time as composite, which judging by your question, you want (someone please correct me if i'm wrong, and tell me how to do it

).

btmiller · 03-10-2007, 06:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lumix

Also, any suggestions for tweaking my radeon or environment in general to make "composite" transparency of windows perform better? My 1.2 Ghz machine crawls just performing simple desktop operations (e.g. menu drops, window move and scroll, etc).

How much memory do you have installed? KDE uses a lot of RAM. Does free show you dipping into swap space? Even on unaccelerated hardware I get good KDE performance, but I have 1 GB of RAM.

lumix · 03-11-2007, 04:23 PM

Free shows me just shy of spilling into swap. I have 512Mb of RAM, which is the max for my EVO.

Hmm: composite vs. rendering...Uber was das ist? or, huh? Or, yes, I'm a dummy... unless you need your corporate network (re-)designed.

btmiller · 03-11-2007, 04:54 PM

It's normal for Linux to use up all the RAM on the system for caching -- what you really want to see is the second line of the free output (the one starting with -/+ buffers/cache). This line subtracts out the memory Linux is using for cache and thus is available to free up for applications right away.

512 MB ought to be OK. You can look at top and hit M to see the top memory consumers on your system. You should also look if something is eating a lot of CPU.