Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[mikemex]

Hi guys,

First, I'd like to thank people for their time and effort to bring Puppy to the public.

I installed Wary 5.3 on this:

* MVP3 motherboard (5EHM)
* AMD K6-3 400 MHz
* 512MB PC100 RAM
* Radeon 7500 32MB AGP
* Soud Blaster Live!
* Intel 2200BG Wireless adapter.
* Maxtor SATA 150 PCI card (Promise TX2+)
* 160GB 7K160 hard drive

As you can see, it's an old computer but it's been upgraded thoroughly so it's not that much of a hopeless cause. My issue is that GUI performance under Linux is way slower than under XP.

It doesn't seem to be X itself because upgrading from 7.3 XOrg to 7.6 caused a glitch that made the eye candy disappear from the windows/menus. I was surprised that native JWM dialogs are very, very fast.

So my question here is: what's bloating the GUI? It must be the theme or something similar.

[Dewbie]

mikemex wrote:

[Karl Godt]

There had been problems with gtk-2.24.5 or 2.24.8 in racy/wary affecting Xdialog guis in the testing time. dont know if this would affect you since you apparently run an official release .

GTK trouble

[mikemex]

Thanks for answering.

I followed your advice and tried with a different version to see if it makes a difference. In particular, I tried the latest "Classic Pup". And yes, performance with JWM is much faster but I must say, the speed increase is noticeably only in system menus. Regular applications run just as slow as with Wary, perhaps just a little faster but not much.

Something I noticed is that firefox didn't want to start. I opened the console and it just died with the "illegal instruction" message. As you may already know, K6 series of processors are not fully i686 compatible. They are sixth generation processors but lack the CMOV instruction set. So any program that is built for i686 simply crashes. I've always thought that it was irresponsible for most distributions to break compatibility releasing i686 binaries in exchange for a very minor performance gain. Is this a reminder that democracy has never been fair to the minorities?

Anyway, it could be GTK. In general, my hypothesis it is the CPU doing all the drawing, so acceleration breaks at some point. It can be the driver, XAA or EXA modules or the hooks inside GUI toolkits. Is there a way to test each?

[Dewbie]

mikemex wrote:

[`f00]

Ah, that Radeon 7500 should be in line for drawing, GPU taking some load off the CPU (if the AMD can subcontract that chore to it) - good unit that, was my first vidcard to handle a multi monitor setup and it's still viable.

A few things that can radically slow down drawing. One is the option of some window managers to redraw window content while moving or resizing windows - far better to use an outline option for this if available!

Xorg 'upgrade' - sometimes it's not (for particular hwr setups), it all depends and mileage varies .. I liked the Xvesa (simple kdrive xserver) option in older pups for simplicity if I didn't really need the full xorg capabilities.

GTK issues - about the only check I do from time to time is looking at /tmp/xerrs.log to see if there's transitory or repeating things. Sometimes they can be safely ignored such as if applets like obconfig (if you have openbox) work ok otherwise

wary - Personally I haven't made the jump beyond wary 514 (kernel 2.6.32 smp), so a 'retro' wary might suit your setup unless ttuuxxx' Classic is working well for you now..

hth - btw, welcome to the pldf @mikemex

[Dewbie]

mikemex wrote:

[RetroTechGuy]

[mikemex]

[mikemex]

I tried Linux several years ago and got tired of spending countless days trying to make things simply go right. It seems like nothing has changed in all this years.

I tried Wary NOP to see if it makes a difference. And yes, it runs faster. Why? I don't know. But frankly speaking, I really, really don't care. Why should I? I'm an user and simply want the machine to do something useful like browsing Internet, playing music or serving files to the network.

Thing is, I had Wary NOP running all good and decided I didn't want Opera. I go to the package manager, install Seamonkey 2.6.1 and fire it. Nothing. Well, I naturally go to the terminal and fire again to see if it gives any error message. Ok, it complains it doesn't have hunspell. Ok, I spend some 15 minutes in the package manager looking for it, had to enable developer packages, had to update the package list, etc. But I end up with hunspell installed.

I fire Seamonkey again, it briefly opens a window and closes. Again, I go to check the console and now it complains about a missing symbol in a shared library. I spend some 15-20 minutes more in Internet trying to figure what the hell it is and I find in a forum that GTK version is not right. I had GTK 2.20 something, it requieres 2.24 something. No big deal, huh? There is a package manager...

I go and install the new GTK version. No complaints at all, except it strangely doesn't show the "installed" dialog. In fact, XFCE starts acting weird. Thing is, I go to the console and X doesn't fire again. Unsurprisingly considering XFCE depends on GTK. Now, what I'm going to do? I know EVERYTHING can be fixed by copying files, making symboling links, editing configuration files and such but I don't want to spend a full month restoring the installation.

At this point I stop and think: do you linux guys realize how absurd is all of this? I mean, installing Windows XP in a machine with all drivers and basic software takes 2 hours at most. Why Linux isn't remotely close to that?

[RetroTechGuy]

[mikemex]

[RetroTechGuy]

[mikemex]

Well, returning to the original topic, I've determined that the slow performance might be caused by a preference for EXA over XAA. XAA seems to deliver much more performance on older hardware (likely, because support is mature unlike EXA). However, I've been unable to try XAA because KMS is taking control over everything and it doesn't really obey options in xorg.conf.

Any idea on how to force XAA?