Hi
i am using linux mint 16 (petra) mate and find it an excellant os
however i wanted to try (cinnamon) but although i could download and open it the following message came up "running in software rendering mode cinnamon is currently running without video hardware acceleration and as a result you may observe much higher than normal cp usage there could be a problem with your drivers" etc etc.i am using the same computer so why should there be any difference.utube is stuttering and other play backs do not play well as i say the "mate"
works fine, is there a remedy.
regards
Major

Mate and Cinnamon differ by one basic thing; The first lays upon software rendering, the latter uses video card acceleration.
This is why, with Cinnamon you get so called "graphical effects", dynamically resizing widnows etc.
One of the reason of the information you're given is that your video card doesn't support 3d acceleration, thus Cinnamon switches to 2d rendering.
However. It is quite impossible to point to one, unique reason without knowing what your videocard is. So, start with telling us that

Unless you removed it Mate should still be present in your login manager dropdown-menu. It's enough to choose it and log in.

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Hi fuorviato
thanks for your reply i have looked up on google and apparently my video card is "sis mirage3 integrated graphics (256mb shared) the computer is an advent 9115 2gb ram
i'm not that bright with computers but am trying out different op systems mint so far looks one of the easier to operate. is there any solution
regards
Allan

Well. Seeing the memory amount on your video card, I assume it may have problems with 3d acceleration.
Anyway.I've checked a bit on the SIS website and googled around a possible solution.

Just to be safe, we need to understand what driver your X server uses currently. I guess it's basic vesa, but let's make sure.
Open your terminal please and paste here the output of the following:

Hi fuorviato
i'm getting "no such drive" on the terminal.In control centre it reads drive/dev/sdp model Generic-multi-card (1.00).the hard disk is Hitachi.when you say basic vesa do you mean vista?as i have
canged my vista back to xp i now have xp and mint on the same laptop and im trying to ween myself off xp and just use mint.
maybe i need a different computer for these new op systems?

Hi,

Are you sure? It may be "no such file" most likely. Right?
Nope. I meant "vesa" which is a basic video driver. In the nutshell, that occurs when a videocard is working without manufacturer driver (in your case "SIS").
When it happens, the basic "vesa" driver is used. I hope you get my point.
Can you relaunch the command
and paste here the exact output please?

Hi fuorviato
thanks for your reply answer was (grep: /etc/X11/xorg.conf: No such file or directory)
hope this may help?
regards
Allan

What do you mean by "open"? I am guessing you are running in a live session from CD or a usb drive? I have seen this message frequently in Linux Mint when running live sessions. It typically goes away after installing to hard drive.

You don't have a video card. Like this computer, you're using integrated graphics: that means the graphics are handled by the motherboard, so there's no acceleration available. You don't need a VESA driver, but the SiS driver, which will certainly have been installed by Mint. The VESA would be no better. Like this computer, yours is just not up to running GUIs with fancy graphics: Unity, Gnome, and Gnome derivatives like Cinnaomn.

You can see details of SiS devices with
lspci | grep SiS
I get
VGA compatible controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 661/741/760 PCI/AGP or 662/761Gx PCIE VGA Display Adapter
and see that the driver was installed with
dmesg | grep sis

Hi David
thanks for your reply so i assume my advent9115 with 2gb ram is not up to the job of using
mint cinnamon 16.is it possible to upgrade with software or is it the hardware im short of.
you must understand that my computer knowledge is very ltd.
regards
Allan
ps linux mint16 (petra) mate works perfectly,but everyone seems to think cinnamon is better?