I've been using Debian, and I've seen what a poor job X11 does with scrolling. My friend says X11 doesn't render the text directly, which is why it is so slow and choppy...I mean, if I scroll far down a page with my scroll wheel, it takes a few seconds to catch up!

Anyway, I originally wanted to use Linux as a server environment, but now I'd like to test out Gentoo as an everyday dekstop environment.

I don't understand, though, how Linux is becoming so popular as a desktop OS, when it's an eyesore just to scroll through a web page!

Am I doing something wrong, here?

Mine scrolls fine - ie instantly - with the scrolly wheel. Not sure what the problem with your box is??? I have mandrake 10 on an nvidia card with the binary driver installed.

>>I don't understand, though, how Linux is becoming so popular as a desktop OS, when it's an eyesore just to scroll through a web page <<

Mine scrolls fine in Mandrake 10, Fedora Core 2 - had probs in Slackware initially though - no scroll - however, simply changed the protocol to IMPS/2 and added a ZaxisMapping option - works fine now

As for Desktop Linux becoming more popular - one element - a pincer movement of incremental improvements on many fronts simultaneously - takes time though.......

Scrolling is fine for me too. Before Mdk10, I had to configure manually, but Mandrake10 did all the configuration automatically.

Yves

Perhaps I don't have my specific video card driver installed, but rather a generic video driver?

Or maybe your wheel is not properly configured for X, so maybe it is imwheel that does all the wheel work, and that's bound to be less than adequate...

Yves.

Its a standard Microsoft WheelMouse...I don't think that it needs any extra configuration.

I was talking to my friend about this, and he simply said that Linux was horrible at scrolling, because X11 does not render the text directly, so it has to keep refreshing the same thing, or something to that effect.

...so I thought this was normal.

My friend said that I needed to use DRI to get scrolling to work smoothly. Is this not true?

DRI is only for some video cards. Do you have a voodoo 3 or something?

If you have an nvidia card you need the binary nvidia driver and with ati you need the ati driver...

That said, I find most linux works fine with most video with the default 2D driver, but you may have some odd onboard video or something.

What video is it... Sorry if you have said and I missed it...