Mepis 3.4 Video Question
Posts: 486
I have a simple question. I have a "built by a computer store" pc they used as their shop pc. I bought it around a year ago and have been using it as a server, no monitor, kb or mouse. But recently I decided to use it as a desktop also, may as well make use of the power bill 
My question is this: When I play a game such as Tuxcart, it is extremely slooooow. Same with Penguin Racer. 1st question; Is there a way to tell if my hardware is capable of such graphics? If so how? 2nd question; Do I need Ndivia drivers?
The pc in general is
1500 MHz
512 RAM
20 GBhd
I ran in console as normal user
$ glxgears
and got
1135 frames in 5.0 seconds = 227.000 FPS
I have searched mepis and it seems that I need drivers or I dont have the hardware, I just do not know how to determine which?
Well, the first thing is to
Posts: 365
Well, the first thing is to find out what kind of video chipset you have. From the console you can type lspci and look for the VGA controller, or from KDE you can got to Kinfocenter (top left of the mini icons on the taskbar in 3.4 if you haven't changed them) and look in the PCI section there.
Then open /etc/X11/xorg.conf in any text editor and look for Section "Device" for the driver that is being used (or you can always cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf | grep Driver).
From those two pieces of info we can determine whether there's a better driver available for you, or whether you'll need a new video card to get better results.
$ lspci 0000:01:00.0 VGA
Posts: 486
$ lspci
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 661/741/760/761 PCI/AGP VGA Display Adapter
$ cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf | grep Driver
Driver "keyboard"
Driver "mouse"
Driver "synaptics"
Driver "mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Driver "wacom"
Driver "wacom"
Driver "wacom"
Driver "vesa"
vesa looks familiar?
Travis
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Maybe one day I'll be able to help if I ask enough questions.
# Linux howto's for newbies from a newbie
I'm sorry to report that
Posts: 365
I'm sorry to report that that series of SIS chips doesn't support hardware 3d acceleration. There is an SIS driver built in to xorg, so you could edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and change vesa to sis. This may help with 2d acceleration so your desktop may (or may not) be a bit snappier, but it won't help much with games.
Nvidia, ATI & Intel are the only chipsets with any decent level of 3d acceleration available now, and even an old Geforce 2mx 32mb card can play tuxracer & planet penguin racer. I often see newer ones than that on Ebay for $20 or so including shipping.
Changed to sis and still
Posts: 486
Changed to sis and still slow, but it doesn't affect entire desktop like vesa did, it is an improvement. I will check out ebay, thanks!
Travis
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Maybe one day I'll be able to help if I ask enough questions.
# Linux howto's for newbies from a newbie
Try this:
Posts: 4077
glxinfo | grep direct
If you get "Direct rendering: no" then it means that you need to install Nvidia official drivers (most likely you need to do that).
Sorry, haven't been running 3.4 for a long time I don't know exactly how to recommend to go about that... you might try MEPIS OS System, if not you can get the driver from NVIDIA site (the legacy one most likely) and install it (you need kernel headers installed)
--
Check out MEPIS Wiki: www.mepis.org/docs