Slackware versions getting a little slower each release?
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Yes. I still have a P-III. Okay it is in storage, but I still have it.
-JJ
A P-III is i686, not i486. You'd have to go back to 1989-1995 for an i486 machine (which probably wouldn't even run Slackware given the RAM/HD requirements). Maybe there exists some ancient i486 server with enough RAM and a big enough hard drive to run Slackware but it's doubtful. Anyway, supporting it doesn't do too much harm. There have been a few threads in the past debating the usefulness of maintaining i486 support on Slackware.
In my opinion, it is the graphics chip.
According to a search engine, your Thinkpad comes with an ATI Rage 128 graphics chip (ATI RAGE Mobility M3) which is currently supported via the r128 Xorg driver.
The performance of this r128 driver has become worse with recent releases.
The first problem is that this driver is not actively maintained.
Pmller,
Thanks for your very informative post!
You've given me a lot to go on for additional research. For one thing, I'll need to figure out how to use the vesa driver with shadowfb.
UPDATE: I added a file to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d called vesa-shadowfb.conf containing the following lines:
Code:
Section "Device"
Identifier "VESA Framebuffer"
Driver "vesa"
Option "ShadowFB" "on"
EndSection
So far, it seems to be working and performance is somewhat snappier.
However, DVD playback is much jerkier using VLC in KDE and XFCE.
I'll need to do some more tweaking.
Pfft! What you need is this kick butt video card I have. It'll move things so fast in your system the screen will probably melt! It's an XipView model XIP-XV1602CI with a whopping 2MB of memory on it! Why, it's so badazz it can get you a resolution of 1600x1280! Most people can't use this card though because they have to have *at least* 4MB of RAM, 2MB of hdd space for the software, and M$-DOS 5.0 or later or Windows 3.10 or 3.11, and at least an I386, I486 or Pentium processor.
You've given me a lot to go on for additional research. For one thing, I'll need to figure out how to use the vesa driver with shadowfb.
UPDATE: I added a file to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d called vesa-shadowfb.conf containing the following lines:
Code:
Section "Device"
Identifier "VESA Framebuffer"
Driver "vesa"
Option "ShadowFB" "on"
EndSection
So far, it seems to be working and performance is somewhat snappier.
However, DVD playback is much jerkier using VLC in KDE and XFCE.
I'll need to do some more tweaking.
Regards,
Lufbery,
there has been a massive change in xorg development with regard to the old r128 driver.
Connor Behan who uses an old r128 graphics chip himself started development on r128 again and ported the r128 driver from the old dead XAA to new EXA: http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-dev...ly/032441.html
This means that r128 will have full-functioning 2D acceleration with newest xorg releases so that it can be used with reasonable speed on newest distributions.
So there is no need to throw away your working hardware. :-)
Distribution: Slackware (personalized Window Maker), Mint (customized MATE)
Posts: 1,309
Rep:
I observed the increasing sluggishness of some applications using Slackware Linux versions from 12.0 to 13.37 on my ThinkPad T60 and ThinkPad X60s. In my case it concerned first of all Firefox. In my opinion it has nothing to do with the system. The last Firefox works much better than the previous releases. I think the Mozilla guys worked on the new features for some time and now they started to optimize the performance. As for watching movies I usually use MPlayer. In order to force it to the jerky work I have to run at the same time the moving or the copying of the huge amounts of data between the different devices. Otherwise it works smoothly with the exception of some badly encoded movies.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lufbery
I tried a method using xorg.conf.d. It works, but seems really jerky.
I don’t know your configuration but in my case TrackPoint works smoothly:
Originally Posted by hitest
Just curious. Why such a huge swap partition?
The swap partition equal in size to the memory could be useful when you hibernate the system from time to time. If you don’t do that the 512 MB of swap space would be usually enough for the system with 2 GB of RAM.
Quote:
Originally Posted by onebuck
Your processor is limited along with memory being a small footprint as compared to today's leading edge hardware.
According to my experience 2 GB of RAM and Intel Core Duo CPU 1.66 GHz is enough in everyday usage. I can run simultaneously the first user’s Window Maker + eleven dockable applications + conky + LibreOffice + GIMP + Firefox + Thunderbird + MPlayer + MOC + a few XTerms, as well as the second’s user Window Maker + eleven dockable applications + BitTorrent or aMule, or mlDonkey + xterm – all of them work smoothly together. However I agree some other programs have bigger demands so the bigger RAM and the faster CPU make sense for some users.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lufbery
JFS
My systems use ReiserFS.
Quote:
Originally Posted by allend
Currently I have just Firefox 10.0, Dolphin and a bash shell open in KDE 4.5.5 and 'free' reports [...] half of the available 1GB of RAM is in use.
For the testing purposes I started all the applications I mentioned above. (Usually I don’t do that because I don’t like to watch the movie, listen the music, type the article, and draw the picture at the same time.)
top
Code:
top - 20:17:46 up 19:10, 8 users, load average: 0.08, 0.19, 0.50
Tasks: 179 total, 1 running, 178 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 27.5%us, 10.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 62.3%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2061116k total, 1996280k used, 64836k free, 74244k buffers
Swap: 1028156k total, 1156k used, 1027000k free, 1350624k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
15967 root 20 0 69172 54m 5648 S 21 2.7 96:31.94 X
5585 john 20 0 61640 21m 8564 S 9 1.1 0:17.98 mplayer
5772 root 20 0 53976 40m 3452 S 3 2.0 10:18.19 X
2710 mary 20 0 193m 36m 12m S 2 1.8 3:25.59 bittorrent
2614 mary 20 0 3472 1316 1068 S 2 0.1 0:59.39 wmtop
5804 mary 20 0 3440 1180 992 S 1 0.1 2:23.77 wmnet
32004 mary 20 0 3740 1604 996 S 1 0.1 1:20.09 wmphoto
1944 john 20 0 103m 3836 2636 S 1 0.2 2:51.05 conky
5800 mary 20 0 3352 1236 1008 S 1 0.1 4:29.55 wmsm
15095 john 20 0 2656 1116 820 R 1 0.1 0:00.03 top
After subtracting from the used memory the buffered and the cached ones it’s 571168 kB of the used memory – about 28% of the total RAM.
Quote:
Originally Posted by H_TeXMeX_H
Although firefox does tend to use a lot of RAM, I think recent versions are better than older ones. They've fixed a lot of memory leaks.
there has been a massive change in xorg development with regard to the old r128 driver.
Connor Behan who uses an old r128 graphics chip himself started development on r128 again and ported the r128 driver from the old dead XAA to new EXA
That is very good news indeed!
I'll be following this development closely. I hope this means that the version of X in the next version of Slackware has the updates to the r128 driver.
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