Ubuntu on a Pentium III 1ghz and games lag bad - why?
 

I am running a P3 1ghz machine and so far everything other than email and browser seem to lag bad, such as Lincity, and scorched earth. I was really expecting Ubuntu to run like greased lightning. Is there something I need to tweak or is this the norm? (I can't believe this is normal)

It probably has a lot to do with your video card and drivers, so what video card do you have and what drivers are you using ?

That Pentium III might have something to do with it.

No 'big' distro like Ubuntu runs real on a pentium 3 with a default install.
You got what - 256 or 512 mb RAM - in there?

VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV11 [GeForce2 MX/MX 400] (rev b2)

Using whatever drivers came with Ubuntu.

Ram is 512mb.

Java on Firefox runs fine. Local installs such as scorched 3D are lagging to the point of not being playable.

I find it hard to believe I was running bloat-ware by the evil empire and can't get simple linux things to function, has to be some tweak somewhere I'm missing, easy miss for a n00b right?

After I get my feet wet and get the hang of running linux I'll dump the GUI and become a purist LOL

That's a reasonable card, not by far the best, but you should be able to run many games with it.

I'm not sure what drivers ubuntu comes with but copy and paste this into a terminal, press Enter, and see if it gives the same result:

It should say:

If not, then I'm pretty sure there exists the proprietary nvidia driver in the ubuntu repo, all you need to do is install it. You will need the 96.43.xx drivers for that card, as it is old.

The only thing that is going to run like greased lightening on that box is puppy. And if you get it running xfce or icewm and spend some time messing around with it you could have a pretty functional system. That thing just does not have the grunt to run ubuntu fast.

Thank you H_TeXMeX_H, that did the trick, scorched earth 3d runs now just fine, likely other stuff will also.

Thank you quad, I'll keep puppy in mind in the event ubuntu proves to be too big and bad for this box.

-now the no sound mystery....
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...8/#post3483367

no problem, I actually have one of those cards on one of my old boxes, you can run plenty with it, up to quake 3 or so.