I discovered MEPIS over the weekend. My quest for a superior distro always has me heading toward a Debian based system (because Debian is awesome!).

So I installed Simply MEPIS 3.3.1. I love it. It looks like it even took care of setting up my ATI drivers for me! So far I've only found Xandros (also awesome) that also does that.

So after installation I played Tux Racer. Weeeee! Worked, but a *tad* choppy. Installed and played UT2004 demo. Worked but it seems a bit choppy too. UT2003 demo didn't suffer as badly but still had video stuttering issues. Not as bad as when there's no hardware acceleration, but enough to bother me.

Anyone have any ideas? If I have to how do I uninstall & reinstall the ATI drivers under MEPIS?

ß

*reinstalled*

Actually I'm half thru reinstall. After work we'll see what happens. Mepis let me keep my /home directory so hopefully that will ease the pain in retransferring all those files I had on the desktop.

After I posted I tried running what I *THINK* was "fglrx-reconfigure xserver-xfree86". It re-set-up my ATI drivers, but doesn't seem to work very well and UT2004 stopped working. I only thought to run glxgears early this morning, and only got like 415 or 500 frames per second. It should be over 4200fps. Having stated that I wonder if the AGP acceleration wasn't truly loaded, and if the studdering (or is it "stuttering"?) that I experienced was a PCI 33MHz limitation...? That makes sense

Neato! My files are still there on the desktop. Reinstalled UT2004demo. Playing soon...

Hopefully the following proves that my AGP is 3d accelerated--
result from "glxgears":
beeblequix@2[~]$ glxgears
19594 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3918.800 FPS
23183 frames in 5.0 seconds = 4636.600 FPS
23182 frames in 5.0 seconds = 4636.400 FPS
23183 frames in 5.0 seconds = 4636.600 FPS
23183 frames in 5.0 seconds = 4636.600 FPS
beeblequix@2[~]$

result from "lsmod|grep agp":
beeblequix@2[~]$ lsmod|grep agp
intel_mch_agp 7952 0
sworks_agp 6944 0
amd_k7_agp 5772 0
ali_agp 5248 0
sis_agp 5892 0
ati_agp 6412 0
nvidia_agp 5788 1
via_agp 7424 0
intel_agp 18204 0
agpgart 27048 10 intel_mch_agp,sworks_agp,amd_k7_agp,ali_agp,sis_agp,ati_agp,nvidia_agp,via_agp,intel_agp

STILL having that crummy choppy bad performance in UT2004.

What else should I examine? Am I having a two sided conversation with myself....?

ATI is notorious for having poor drivers in linux, because they quite frankly dont care about linux support. Nvidia however has some decent drivers. You also might not have enough ram.

No, I have pretty solid equipment.

This pc:
AthonXP 3200+
Abit NF7-S v2
2x512MB Mushkin Level II Black 2-2-2-6 settings in dual channel mode (one DIMM has BH5 chips, the other Samsung which is why the last setting is stuck at 6 instead of 5)
1x 80GB WD800JB 7200 rpm drive (XP)
1x 80GB ST380013A Seagate 7200 rpm drive (Linux)
HIS IceQ Excalibur Radeon 9800 pro
and other stuff...

other rig:
P4 2.8 Northwood
MSI 865PE Neo-2 Platinum
2x512MB Kingston HyperX, dual channel mode 2-3-3-6 relaxed settings
Performance Acceleration Technology (PAT) settings: TurboMAT
ATI X800 pro 256MB AGP 8x
and a bunch of other stuff...

My hardware though a little older can still kick ***, and 1GB RAM is more than adequate. It's gotta be something else.

Do I have to do something like "recompile the nforce 2 kernel" or somesuch? Should I try it on the Pentium 4 system instead of the Athy?

I tried to "renice" the UT2004 process to -5 (which I think makes it higher priority than default 0) but didn't work. Any more ideas? thx.

ß

like i said, its most likely the poor ATI drivers that ATI puts out.

Mmmkay. Here's how I broke and fixed my 3d acceleration:
1)got mad
2)ran "fglrxinstall" (which seems normal to me....)
3)rebooted
4)discovered UT2004 demo that it wouldn't load
5)discovered glxgears only gave me like 313fps
6)got mad again. Inserted MEPIS cd to reinstall os
7)found a part of the install cd that fixes GRUB and also VIDEO
8)therefore, re-did the ATI setup logged on as root from the live cd/install area
9)reboot
10)ran "glxgears", but still had under 4000fps (maybe it was 1300 but still low)
11)got mad. Ran "fglrxinfo" only to discover the friggin Mesa drivers (should be ATI drivers)
12)clicked on "MEPIS OS Center"
13)System Configuration-->Mouse and Display-->ATI-->ATI Special Driver Options--> CHECKED the box to enable "Official ATI fglrx driver"
14)rebooted
15)was no longer mad. "glxgears" gives me over 4000fps. "fglrxinfo" shows ATI drivers not Mesa. UT2004 demo still doesn't play well but I'll get that fixed eventually.

On my other Linux install (different hardware) I got different results.

I went back to Debian Sarge on the P4 rig. I installed the base, then the kernel headers and kernel source (used latest 2.6.8 or 2.6.11 for 686-smp), rebooted, new terminal, su, installed ATI's drivers, rebooted, modprobe installed the two intel agp drivers (intel-agp.ko and intel-mch-agp.ko), installed UT2004 demo.

And it played well. No studdering. I wonder if it's related to the Mepis install using Xorg and Sarge using XFree86.

Maybe I'll strip Mepis and manually set it up.