(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

hi there,

now that the sound is ON, I have tried to play a video for my daughter, but it won't work - I open gxine, open a video file (from HDD) and it starts fine, but if I make it bigger on the screen it gets jumpy and then gxine just closes without any warning. On my computer I also had similar video issues and I found that it was related to available resources and the player I was using. I have ubuntu with IceWM and idesk and I play video files with VLC and it is OK, I can make the picture bigger or do fullscreen without a problem.

the two computers are:

puppy computer:
P2 400 128meg
32meg Hercules graphics card

ubuntu computer
P2 400 256meg
64meg Nvidia graphics card

(interestingly, the screen flicker is too annoying when I run Puppy on the second machine, but no noticable flicker on the first, despite the Hercules card being a pain to find correct drivers for on every other version of linux I have tried - hence the Nvidia card)

What other problems apart from the flicker do you have with the second machine.

the second machine, my computer, has ubuntu on it with iceWM/idesk instead of gnome, when it still had gnome everything was a bit slow, video was jumpy, and sound-video sync was off. After I swapped to the lightweight gui the issues resolved (I sometimes use xine and it works OK too)

I could just put ubuntu on my daughters PC and configure the same as mine, but it was a labour of love getting mine to work OK, and it would be pretty hard to do with no internet for downloading all the packages I had to get. That's why puppy seems worth a try, it is already lightweight and shouldn't eat up all the CPU/ram, I am going to try installing VLC from the tar.gz file, I have always found it works really well on my old computers (even the windows version is one of the best windows based video players I have used)

To answer your question properly though - I have no video issues with the second machine anymore, but it is not running Puppy and I never bothered trying to play video on it with puppy as it had no sound (although I know how to fix that now) also, video is fine under windows98 on both computers.

p2 400 mhz is slow to play movies

Ubantu would have hardware accelerated drivers (the video card does most of the work) ... Puppy uses xvesa (the cpu does most of the work ... scaling a movie so it displays at a different size is hard work for a cpu)

so video isn't going to work?

can I get some other video driver package?

I know that Hercules provide linux drivers for this card, but only for 2.4 kernels, is puppy a 2.6?

It's a known bug, the version of Gxine used in Puppy can't display full-screen.

This will be fixed.
There was a bit of a problem I ran into, but hope to upgrade Gxine soon.

but I will still have the same slow processor problems though won't I? Is there no way to enable graphics acceleration?