[plug] New toy closer to being usable

[Richard Meyer]

On Sun, 2006-05-28 at 10:31 +0800, Shannon Carver wrote:
> Richard Meyer wrote:
> > On Sat, 2006-05-27 at 21:05 +0800, Bernd Felsche wrote:
> >   
> >> Richard Meyer <meyerri at westnet.com.au> writes:
> >>
> >>     
> >>> I know here are some of you following my travails with my new Dell
> >>> 6400. 
> >>>       
> >>> I've got the Radeon drivers installed and what a toil! It's not nearly
> >>> as easy as doing Nvidia drivers with SUSE Linux, where you just click to
> >>> install on the first YOU update.
> >>>       
> >> Bug in the distro. I can see how those things can slip through even
> >> beta-testing and the first two attempted escapes (release
> >> candidates; for the politically correct).
> >>     
> >
> > Nope they don't supply Radeon drivers, and maybe with this release they
> > don't supply Nvidia drivers either ..
> >   
> >>> Anyway, I got SUSE 10.1 installed and it's rather nice - lots of
> >>> bleeding edge software - they've changed a few things, like online
> >>> updates are done by Red Carpet rather than Yast Online Update. This
> >>> *fails* when it tries to install the first upgrades, but you can use
> >>> YAST to start off YOU manually and it works as it always did.
> >>>       
> >>> Anyway - after I installed, I had these huge bloated fonts and screens.
> >>> I could tell Sax2 to change from 800x600 to 1280x800, but it was a waste
> >>> of breath. Eventually I used this page
> >>> http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/17340.html to install the
> >>> drivers. There is one caveat - when I tried to run that long incantation
> >>> of theirs about: sax2 -r -m 0=fglrx
> >>> -b /usr/share/doc/packages/fglrx/sax2-profile - it failed - I eveutally
> >>> found a README file that said to leave off everything after the
> >>> "0=fglrx" part, and then it worked brilliantly - glxgears gave me 1550
> >>> frames/sec, from a laptop chipset, so I'm happy.
> >>>       
> >> Ludicrous. Who can *see* 1550 fps?
> >>     
> >
> > *blush* frames/min - ok a slip of the finger..
> >   
> 
> Nah! glxgears measures in frames/sec, I think what Bernd was getting at, 
> was the fact that it was ludicrous to need anymore than a few hundred 
> fps a second as thats all the human eye can see.  I've read various 
> reports of the eye "seeing" a lot more than the supposed 30 fps that 
> we're apparently limited to.w
> 
> Course, if I was totally wrong about what the Ludicrous comment for, 
> disregard above!
> 
> And yes, glx gears isn't a rock solid benchmarker, but it gives you a 
> general idea of wether 3D acceleration is working correctly or not and 
> about how good the card is.  For example, my Geforce 4 only gets 
> 900-1000, and 6600GT gets about 1500 as well.

Oops, shows I shouldn't post while distracted. And you're both right -
but, glxgears is an indicator of how well the video card will hold up
under the latest 3D games with rendering and shading and what-not. Not a
rock-solid indicator, but still an indicator.


BTW - sound is working but very quietly - I'll have to read up a bit
more - and it's not a case of unmuting something or turning of "external
amplifier" settings - the sound controls are so sparse that I've been
able to try every combination of everything in Kmix and alsamixer.

Cheers
-- 
Richard Meyer <meyerri at westnet.com.au>