I recently installed Slackware in dual boot beside Arch.
I am sure there might be dozen of things to consider or look at but I am not clear as to how to proceed with the folowing.
I installed rxvt-unicode from Slackbuild.org and it seems not to respond as fast as it does when used in Arch. There is that fraction of a second where it seems to hang when typing.

Out of curiosity, I modified the slackbuild script to reflect the PKGBUILD in Arch, reinstalled rxvt and yet no improvement.

So is there a specific area I should look at?

Thanks all.

Hi and welcome to the Club

IIRC a possible culprit *could* be the nouveau version included in Slackware 13.37, as I observed that with it but not with a more recent one nor with the blob that I am right now using.

But I usually run xterm, not rxvt-unicode. Did you try with an xterm and does that make any difference?

I will switch to nouveau later today and will tell you if I still observe this behavior.

Meanwhile, what are your GPU kernel driver + X module used for video? If it's Intel or ATI my assumption can be safely moved to /dev/null "lspci -k| grep -A3 VGA" is usually enough to answer that.

OTOH, would it be right you just would have to wait a few days till Slackware 14 be released (if, indeed, you are not already running Slackware-current).

Hi,

do you use antialiasing? i have had the same "problem" with rxvt-unicode, i disabled antialiasing and now it's ok.

regards fl0

@Didier. Thanks for the welcome.

My graphic card is nvidia...My Arch installation uses the nvidia driver. If I find time and boot Arch, I should probably try to install the nouveau driver for comparison purposes.

I am running Slackware 13.37 at the moment.
I briefly tried xterm. Hard to tell. I will see if I can customize it a bit i.e. no border, black background and see how it goes.

@fl0. No I don't use antialiasing In fact, this is my configuration

I can't try now (it's late in Paris) but tomorrow I will switch ton nouveau in both Slackware 13.37 and Slackware current. If I see a difference I will try a more recent version of nouveau in Slackware 13.37 and tell you the results, both with xterm and urxvt.

Nothing really obvious here using nouveau. I have an awk script started from an xterm and spitting one line of text every 4 seconds. Sometime the first horizontal half of a line line is displayed first, then the second half. But the script is very CPU hungry so that may not be significant.

You could check that the nouveau driver *could* be involved with "cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.vesa /etc/X11/xorg.conf" and restart X to see if there is any change using the vesa driver instead of nouveau.

You mean an awk script on rxvt I presume... . The thing is it's really when I type text as opposed to when displaying say a long ls command which seem fine. Now looks like xterm behaves better. I will look at terminator too for comparison purposes.

Mario

I am on Slackware 14-RC5 now.

I confirm that xterm looks more responsive. I don't know for urxvt as I didn't install it yet.

Glad to see I am not crazy . Anyway, been satisfied so far. I installed terminator. Looks good. Slackware will likely end up on my netbook too, soon.

On my older PC I've also encountered this issue with urxvt. I believe the problem was solved by installing the nvidia driver.

nouveau is a kernel mode setting driver, so that likely won't work unless the OP also blacklists it (and reboots).

Good point. I just tried, and though Xorg.0.log show nothing weird, the nouveau kernel module becomes angry that his buddy the nouveau X module be discarded. To avenge this affront it spits so many[*] lines like this one in the logsthat the system becomes *really* unresponsive

[*] 645 lines accounting for 106258 characters in one second.

Was a duplicate post.

Well, I try rebooting with an xorg.conf but the screen resolution kind of suck. I set up terminator to my liking and will go with that. It has been a learning experience .