Hello all,

I use linux on my Dell Inspiron 3800 laptop. It's got a Celeron Centrino 550 processor, 64 MB of Ram, a 5.0 GB hard drive and a 8 MB ATI Rage Mobility (mach64) video card. I like trying different linux distributions and periodically switch between them in search of the perfect fit for my laptop.

I few months ago I breifly tried Mandriva with KDE 3.3 before I got fed up with requests to join their "club" and switched to Debian. What has always frusterated me about my brief stint with Mandriva is that out of all the distributions and combinations of GNOME, KDE, Xfce, and Flux I have tried, Mandriva gave me (by far) the best video performance.

I am now using Ubuntu with GNOME and recently got DRI to work with my Rage card. I installed "planet-penguin-racer" (a game I enjoyed playing in Mandriva) but when I attempted to load it, the frame rate was so low it was unplayable. I know that it is not a hardware thing as it ran fine in Mandriva, but in every subsequnt distro. I have tried it is unplayable.

So my question is, why would Mandriva give me better video performance then Ubuntu when DRI is enabled and functional in both? The only difference that I can think of would be the fact that Mandriva runs KDE while Ubuntu uses GNOME. But conventional wisdom seems to be that GNOME is by far the faster environment. So I'm stumped.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

"I installed "planet-penguin-racer" (a game I enjoyed playing in Mandriva) but when I attempted to load it, the frame rate was so low it was unplayable."

This sounds like DRI is NOT succesfully loaded.

Have a look here: http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/DriTroubleshooting
they have some good tips. Basically: latest drivers, latest X, glxinfo