sluggish scrolling in konkeror
 

I just Installed OpenSuse 10.2 in my new desktop pc (which features an MSI Board running an Athlon-64 4200+ processor with 1GB DDR memory and a 300Kb internet connection).

While my machine's performance is, in general, good and as I expected, for some extrange reason Konkeror's window scrolling is extremely sluggish. When I press the "down" or "up", or "page-up" or "pagedown" arrow keys the screen starts moving in an animated mode that ends about 2 seconds later!!!
If I try to use the mouse wheel the same thing happens and worse! because I don't know when it's going to finish scrolling.
I've tried the "settings" both in Konkeror and KDE's menu and have found no way of changing this behavior.
Other applications like Kwrite, or OpenOffice, or even Firefox don't show this delay, but since Konkeror is the predefined browser and file manager and has nice gadgets I wanted to use it, so this seems to me unreasonable.

If anybody knows something that could help, I'd be glad.
Thank you!

Edgardo Arrieta
Bogota, Colombia
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By the way, my graphics card is an on-board ATI Radeon express 1250 which Suse did not recognize, but instead configured it as a "VESA framebuffer graphics", so Yast displays always a message saying "The configuration is Framebuffer based and your system does not support changes for resolution and/or color settings" whenever I try to change it. And although most things work fine, I've not been able to install the ATI drivers because they've crashed twice the graphics system and I've had to reinstall the whole system two times because of that. I finally decided I would try that when I have more time! since this is my work machine.

Installing the proprietary ATI drivers can cause trouble. However VESA driver is not too efficient, and the scrolling problem might be caused by that driver (or not, but it's a possibility). Try changing your display driver from 'vesa' to 'radeon', if you're using a Radeon card. It doesn't provide hardware 3d accelaration, but it's better than VESA and should work for you (there was also this 'ati' driver I remember, but 'radeon' should be for you). Either configure it in YaST if it lets you to, or just edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf directly - locate the device section where it talks about your card and replace vesa with radeon. Restart of X is required after this - hit CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE for example.

Yast doesn't let me change the graphics card setting. I changed it manually
in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and changed the line (Driver "fbdev" ) into (Driver "radeon") and after rebooting the system did not load graphics. I tried "xterm" and "xinit" and there was an error message which ended in "no screen available" and "no device found" ...

Well, I'm happy to say that I made it myself !!!
after a lot of browsing I found a user who could not install proprietary ATI drivers but instead used fglrx package. So I ran ati-driver-installer-8.38.6-x86.x86_64.run and instead ot the automatic install I selected "create distribution package" and then selected "opensuse 10.2" so it created the file fglrx64_7_1_0_SUSE102-8.38.6-1.x86_64.rpm
which then I installed using
rpm -i -v --hash --force --nosignature fglrxXX...rpm
and finally I had to follow the instructions in a readme file: 1) to login as root, switch to run level 3 and 2) issue "sax2 -r -m 0=fglrx" and it worked!!
Finally the sluggish behavior of konkeror is gone and although Yast still says "VESA framebuffer" it is using the ati card ! I post this in case anyone might find it usefull.