Ubuntu Linux

[npal]

Personally I just have every disk (internal or external) besides the Vista and Ubuntu disk on FAT 32. That way I can download torrents from Ubuntu and Vista into the same directory, so it's all neat and simple. I also keep GRUB on a floppy so as not to mess with MBR (prefer Windows loader, plus my favorite OS was always Windows so if something must stay, it'll be WIndows). It's a perfect dual boot environment with as little fuss between OSes as possible. I'm not using Bitlocker on the Vista partition cause I need Ubuntu to be able to fetch some data from NTFS. Other than that, I've cool. I had some problems with this new restricted modules thing that was messing up NVIDIA driver installation but I found the solution and Beryl is working fine. Although Beryl makes Ubuntu run like Vista running with Norton... Ah well, it's cooler than Aero although most of the effects are totally unnecessary. Really, people complaining about Aero taking up resources should try Beryl for resource destruction

[WanderingKnight]

Although Beryl makes Ubuntu run like Vista running with Norton... Ah well, it's cooler than Aero although most of the effects are totally unnecessary. Really, people complaining about Aero taking up resources should try Beryl for resource destruction

Huh? My machine is pretty old, and in no ways could even run Vista, let alone Aero, and it runs Beryl quite well without much hassle. And the other day I installed it in a friend's PC that didn't even have half of Vista's minimum requirements, and it ran perfectly.

[grey_moon]

Mine too! Beryl is dreamy on it (and as u pointed mostly unnecessary, but I have nearly all the effects on ).

If you have jerkyness this might help...

"Open beryl-settings-manager. In the General Options page, under the Main tab, uncheck Sync To VBlank, uncheck Detect Refresh Rate and change Refresh Rate to 200."

Beryl is my favourite way to introduce my friends to Linux. They all mostly use FF, TB and OO now anyways so the transition for them isn't so bad.

But since we are on in regards to Beryl on the Ubuntu thread, did anyone know that Compiz (Beryl is a fork of it), is installed by default on 7.04!

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=371700

[npal]

Strange, as my machine was upgraded this March before Vista and I can feel Beryl's drag. Aero isn't that great of an eyecandy, but it doesn't make my FPS drop like Beryl. If it's nothing else, it's probably crappy Nvidia support on Ubuntu for my 8800GTS 640. Then again, the same performance drop was noticeable on my SLI 7900GT so it can't be the cards.

People should run Aero before forming an opinion though Aero isn't on Beryl's level, but it's a smoother desktop experience.

[grey_moon]

Yah that card isnt supported properly yet, but the 7900GT is....

You should be able to run Beryl on a GeForce 3 never mind your cards (which beats the panties off mine btw )

Currently I've got mine running on a low end 6200 (128mb) and it is really slick with all of the effects on...

If anyone knows how to record screens on Linux I'll record it spinning the transparent cube with the earth and tiny moon skydome.

[Dhomochevsky]

Beryl runs smooth on my laptop with i945 chipset (although I am missing the top bars of windows, so I cant move them around easily )
That chipset cant even produce good fps on 5 year old 3D games, so your monster 3D cards there should handle it without any effort. If its jerky, there should be some other reason.

I dont recommend beryl for laptops though, it draws battery power like crazy and performing mouse gestures on a touchpad isnt easy at all.

[WanderingKnight]

People should run Aero before forming an opinion though Aero isn't on Beryl's level, but it's a smoother desktop experience.

I saw Aero running in a laptop with 1GB RAM at a store, and before any clerk saw me I checked how much of a processor hog it was... 70% of memory being used. Nuff said. I have 512 MB and a really old Nvidia FX 5200 128 MB, and it barely drains 20-30% of my resources.

(although I am missing the top bars of windows, so I cant move them around easily )

That can be fixed by editing your xorg.conf. If you've got an Nvidia card, go to your xorg.conf and add the following lines under section "Device".

Option "AddARGBVisuals" "True"
Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
Option "NoLogo" "True"
Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "true"

Note that I can't remember exactly which were the ones that you specifically had to add to get rid of the disappearing title bars effect, so you might want to backup your xorg.conf first.

But since we are on in regards to Beryl on the Ubuntu thread, did anyone know that Compiz (Beryl is a fork of it), is installed by default on 7.04!

Yeah, but Compiz is much more of a system hog in my case, it's less customizable, and it doesn't have the cubic virtual desktop effect.

[Syaoran]

You're exaggerating about Aero. I've Vista on a laptop with 1GB ram & 1.6Ghz centrino. It runs smooth. The only thing that makes it reach a 100% peak for just a fraction of a second is when you move over the sidebar and its transparency changes. For the rest it's around 3-10% cpu in idle.

[WanderingKnight]

You're exaggerating about Aero. I've Vista on a laptop with 1GB ram & 1.6Ghz centrino. It runs smooth. The only thing that makes it reach a 100% peak for just a fraction of a second is when you move over the sidebar and its transparency changes. For the rest it's around 3-10% cpu in idle.

Oh, should clarify: I was talking about RAM. Maybe you got confused because I mistakingly said "processor hog".

[Syaoran]

*grin* yeah ^^'

It's a little heavy on RAM side, but I believe it has more to do with the prefetching than Aero, which is good.

Ubuntu is also @ >40% RAM usage.
I remember Gentoo was often at > 90% RAM, but it was still performant. Depends on the way the system uses it.
I'd be more concerned in vista pumps 90% RAM and has a huge pagefile.

[WanderingKnight]

Ubuntu is also @ >40% RAM usage.

Without Beryl nor any other program open, Ubuntu takes 100 MB out of my 512 MB (that is, around 20%). With Beryl open, it pumps only by 5% or so. However, the effects do take its toll on the processor whenever moving around windows or using the cubic effect.

[grey_moon]

I've done the spin a cube whilst there is a movie playing full screen and it did it with no jerking at all It was pretty weird watching the movie from behind when the cube was transparent. I haven't tried to play 4 different movies yet.....

Slight change of topic, Liteon DVD Writers is the bane of happy nix life....

Got a new batch of DVD's and they wouldn't burn properly, find I need to update the firmware and the firmware program in windows only!!!! At least supply a DOS one u *beep*.... Tried wine n all sniffle, looks like I'll need to rip out the drive and pop it into my windows box which is a shuttle, not looking forward to it.... Sent them a letter (polite) expressing my concern....

[WanderingKnight]

I've done the spin a cube whilst there is a movie playing full screen and it did it with no jerking at all

Don't get me wrong, I can do that as well and there's no jerking, but I was talking about the actual process shown in the system monitor menu. Of course, those processor jumps are instantaneous and don't get in the way at all.

Seems I keep getting misunderstood today ^^;

[Vexx]

.... doesn't the RAM usage depend on what services you have running? (rhetorical question)

If I'm running a service heavy machine on Ubuntu versus a stripped version, I'm going to get significantly different RAM usage results. Of course, with Ubuntu I also have a choice of window managers so I can pick a lean one for a server.

@grey_moon: wow, yes that's annoying (not that I haven't had to do it before). Did you check sourceforge to see if anyone has written something to do it in *nix?

[wnmnkh]

Ubuntu is surely lighter than Windows vista and XP. I am using a old Sony laptop with Ubuntu and it is smoother than with XP. my 2cents here.

[SeijiSensei]

Originally Posted by Vexx

Of course, with Ubuntu I also have a choice of window managers so I can pick a lean one for a server.

For servers, I usually change the line
id:5:initdefault:
to
id:3:initdefault
in /etc/inittab. Then the machine boots up into text mode and doesn't waste any resources on X or window managers .

You can always type "startx" from the command prompt if you need to run the GUI. Most of the time I'm using ssh to talk to these machines remotely anyway. And, with X-Windows, if I need a GUI application, I can run it on the remote server and display it on my local workstation. You can even use X tunneling in ssh to have the entire session be encrypted.

Beryl is pretty, but it put too much load on my meagre 2.6 GHz Celeron and 512M. I went back to the standard KDE window manager.

[Ledgem]

Many of Beryl's effects didn't run terribly smoothly for me. My graphics card is a GeForce 4 ti4600, go figure. I couldn't run some of the Beryl effects (such as the rain) as the card didn't support the correct OpenGL version, I suppose. (1 GB RAM, Socket 754 Sempron 3100+, blah blah...)

I appreciate the minor effects, though. And I'm sure that I could tweak it so that the performance would be better.

(Using OpenSUSE, not Ubuntu! But it sort of fits into this thread anyway)

[grey_moon]

@WK - Hee hee sorry to misunderstand you! Also I guess I am being lazy as when I do these things I should really get something to log resource usage.

[npal]

BTW, I tried installing some legacy games with WINE in Ubuntu but I realised that the inability to play mid affects the WINE engine as well. So is there any way to play mid files in Ubuntu?

[grey_moon]

Originally Posted by npal

BTW, I tried installing some legacy games with WINE in Ubuntu but I realised that the inability to play mid affects the WINE engine as well. So is there any way to play mid files in Ubuntu?

Have u enabled midi with winecfg?

*Edit*

I think I just read your question properly....

So what you are saying is your version of ubuntu doesn't play midi files?

Let me test mine to see if it is a general ubuntu thing....

*EDIT*
Hmmm midi doesn't work on my vmware version, and I just had a look on the Ubuntu forums about getting it working and I was a little shocked....

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=8736