slow youtube / changing xorg driver [solved]

[mr_volvo]

Hi,
I'm still loving my 5.9 experience but...

youtube (and all the other flash vid sites) is basically unwatchable, the frame rate is ridiculously slow and thus I have been under the impression for the last 2 weeks thats every new music filmclip is stop motion. Now I think that this is a driver issue as (as I mentioned in another post) the screen sometimes gets a bit funky with black and white lines appearing randomly until that section of the screen is redrawn.
the only difference between my 5.8soho xorg and my 5.9 xorg is the driver section:

5.8

Code:

Driver      "i810"

5.9

Code:

Driver      "intel"

Now excuse my naïvety but I just changed the above section (intel to i810), restarted, and nothing had improved. Have I proven that it isn't a driver issue, or have I just proven that I'm still learning?

Any help would be appreciated I don't really know what to try next.

[uelsk8s]

mr_vovlo,
Try the vesa driver first. the intel drivers are pretty bad on some cards.
there are a lot of driver options that you can try if the vesa driver doesnt work for you then let us know what chipset your video card uses and we can try and figure it out from there.

[mr_volvo]

Thanks uelsk8s, I changed to the vesa driver xorg.conf in vasm and I couldn't get X to start at all. Apprently, the graphics chip inside is an Intel i830M.
Any thoughts?

[uelsk8s]

post the putput of "lspci|grep VGA" ran as root.
I have never heard of a chipset that wouldnt run with the vesa driver.
try editing the file as root and changing the Driver      "i810" to Driver      "vesa"

[The Headacher]

I have never heard of a chipset that wouldnt run with the vesa driver.

My ATI mobility Radeon x2300 doesn't work with vesa either.

[mr_volvo]

Thanks for the continued help.
Once again I couldn't get vesa to work, the error was 'No Screens Found' after i typed startx back in the console.

Code:

root:# lspci | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82830 CGC [Chipset Graphics Controller] (rev 04)

[uelsk8s]

try commenting out the dri lines in your xorg.conf file there should be a few
#Load "dri"
and
#Section "DRI"
#Mode 0666
#EndSection
you can also try lowering your default depth to 16 instead of 24

[mr_volvo]

wow, I just broke X!

I had edited out the DRI entries in xorg.conf when I came across an intel driver pack at linuxpackages. That was a mistake. Now I get an error about a module being unable to load whichever driver I select. Running vasm autoconfig doesn't fix it (neither does switching to the vesa conf) so I think I have messed up my drivers fairly well. But it is ok, I was having fun messing around with stuff and now I have an excuse to do less work. I'm at work without my cd drive so I guess my original problem is put on hold for a couple of days; until I can reinstall vector.

But I'm still wondering why the problem (poor vid card drivers/poor frame rate) wasn't apparent in 5.8. Is there a list of drivers that have been removed from the base install? Is it possible to install another distro and  steal the drivers? I'm quite happy to do some compiling and configuring to get it to work it just baffles me how I could lose support for the chip.

Thanks again. Perhaps this means I will just have to learn how to do all my work from the console. vi and wget here i come!

 

[uelsk8s]

wow, I just broke X!

I had edited out the DRI entries in xorg.conf when I came across an intel driver pack at linuxpackages. That was a mistake. Now I get an error about a module being unable to load whichever driver I select. Running vasm autoconfig doesn't fix it (neither does switching to the vesa conf) so I think I have messed up my drivers fairly well. But it is ok, I was having fun messing around with stuff and now I have an excuse to do less work. I'm at work without my cd drive so I guess my original problem is put on hold for a couple of days; until I can reinstall vector.

But I'm still wondering why the problem (poor vid card drivers/poor frame rate) wasn't apparent in 5.8. Is there a list of drivers that have been removed from the base install? Is it possible to install another distro and  steal the drivers? I'm quite happy to do some compiling and configuring to get it to work it just baffles me how I could lose support for the chip.

Thanks again. Perhaps this means I will just have to learn how to do all my work from the console. vi and wget here i come!

we have not removed any drivers.
if you google your card you will see many problems across all distro's.
if you look at the man page for intel you will see all the options you can try.

[mr_volvo]

You are correct uelsk8s, from what I've read these past few days it appears to be a problem with newer versions of X. That said I'm not about to downgrade as I guess that would be a sure fire way to mess up my otherwise working installation. I guess im stuck for a bit.

Cheers for the help.

[uelsk8s]

if your willing to try a few things I think you can find something that will work there.
the first thing i would try is to open the file /etc/profile.d/vasm.sh and comment out the last line
then save it and reboot, and open a terminal and try a few things out if all  that is ok open a full screen app and see if its better or worse. If its better leave it if not change it back and reboot.

the next thing to try would be the driver options in xorg.conf.
here is a good device section to start with. it has the extra driver options commented out.

Code:

Section "Device"
        ### Available Driver options are:-
        ### Values: <i>: integer, <f>: float, <bool>: "True"/"False",
        ### <string>: "String", <freq>: "<f> Hz/kHz/MHz"
        ### [arg]: arg optional
        #Option     "NoAccel"            # [<bool>]
        #Option     "SWcursor"            # [<bool>]
        #Option     "ColorKey"            # <i>
        #Option     "CacheLines"          # <i>
        #Option     "Dac6Bit"            # [<bool>]
        #Option     "DRI"                # [<bool>]
        #Option     "NoDDC"              # [<bool>]
        #Option     "ShowCache"          # [<bool>]
        #Option     "XvMCSurfaces"        # <i>
        #Option     "PageFlip"            # [<bool>]
Identifier  "Card0"
Driver      "intel"
VendorName  "Intel Corporation"
BoardName   "82830 CGC [Chipset Graphics Controller]"
BusID       "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection

try going through them and enabling the options like this

Code:

Section "Device"
        ### Available Driver options are:-
        ### Values: <i>: integer, <f>: float, <bool>: "True"/"False",
        ### <string>: "String", <freq>: "<f> Hz/kHz/MHz"
        ### [arg]: arg optional
        #Option     "NoAccel"            # [<bool>]
        #Option     "SWcursor"            # [<bool>]
        #Option     "ColorKey"            # <i>
        #Option     "CacheLines"          # <i>
        #Option     "Dac6Bit"            # [<bool>]
        #Option     "DRI"                # [<bool>]
        #Option     "NoDDC"              # [<bool>]
        #Option     "ShowCache"          # [<bool>]
        #Option     "XvMCSurfaces"        # <i>
        #Option     "PageFlip"            # [<bool>]
        Option      "Legacy3D"               "True"
Identifier  "Card0"
Driver      "intel"
VendorName  "Intel Corporation"
BoardName   "82830 CGC [Chipset Graphics Controller]"
BusID       "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection

there are more options in the intel man page. I think the Legacy3d option would be good for your card.

HTH, and let us know how it goes
Uelsk8s

[mr_volvo]

Thanks for this, I'll go through all the options on the weekend. For now I have enabled legacy 3d and while I haven't noticed a massive improvement at least it hasn't broken X. What would I be losing if I tried to install a previous (<7) version of X? I was wondering as I'm not trying to run compiz or anything particularly taxing or new at the moment. I don't even watch dvd's, just the odd downloaded movie.

[uelsk8s]

I dont think you would be losing anything, but there is no guarantee that a version of X <7 will work on 5.9 at all.

[mr_volvo]

So legacy 3d and removing the dri entries seems to have solved my funky black lines problem. I'm using the intel driver with 24 bit colour depth.

Now the flash problem turned out not to be a driver problem at all. As the following post suggests it was really just flash 9. I have downgraded to flash 7 and things are working well enough.
http://www.vectorlinux.com/forum2/index.php?topic=5611.0

Cheers.