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[sheddyian]

Chrome is a lot faster than the built in browsers, so that's a bonus - it doesn't flicker, and the scrolling is much better.

I think it's even faster than Windows on the same machine

What browser would you (that's you, anyone!) install on Debian, if global monolith Google is out of favour?

Anyway, that's enough change for one day.  I'm off back to Windows, because that's where all my bookmarks and emails still reside!

Ian

[asbokid]

Code: [Select]

[sudo] password for ian:
ian is not in the sudoers file.  This incident will be reported.


That's an important early task, to add yourself, as a non-privileged user to the list of sudoers.
There's a special tool to do it! 

From a root shell:

Code: [Select]

# visudo


Anyway, it's defaintely faster than the other two supplied browsers, but I'd say it's still slower than Windows XP.  The animated gifs are still flickering badly.  Even closing a window seems to take a moments thought before the window disappears.

Maybe there's a video driver issue?  Is it running at the same resolution, refresh rate, and all that, as it was in Windows?

It's frustrating because this is the 3rd time I've tried to use Linux on a PC.  First time, in late 1990's, I couldn't get it to work at all with my graphics card (s3 based, can't remember what now).  Windows was more than happy with it.

Hmm.. that's down to the poor faith of S3, now part of VIA Tech, who won't release critical hardware data needed to build a better driver.   I'm of the mind now, to buy hardware only once it's assuredly 100% compatible with Linux!

I'm making progress - at least it boots, even if's slower than Windows 

Could it be a networking issue slowing it down as well?  Or is it just slow screen rendering?  Credit where it's due though. it's amazing it's up and running so quickly.    I wouldn't look back, even if the performance hit can't be immediately remedied!

cheers, a

[asbokid]

Iceweasel is Firefox by another name (the puritans at Debian won't use the name Firefox because it's a protected trademark).   There's Konqueror from the KDE camp, that quite nice.  Epiphany is more for local browsing of directories. Never intended as an everyday browser, although expect to be corrected!    Chromium is basically Chrome, but fully open source and packaged by Debian maintainers.

The trouble with picking up binaries from the internet, and installing them, even from people like Google, is that they won't be routinely updated.   By just issuing the following command, all packages  in a Debian system with available updates are retrieved and installed, but only if you installed them in the first place through apt.   Software installed by downloading packages or even raw binaries won't be updated.

Code: [Select]

$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Chrome has probably got some spyware in it that will secretly phone home periodically. Ostensibly to check for updates, but in the process apparently telling Google about your browsing, etc!   So far as I understand it, that was largely the point of Chromium, to seize back control of the Chrome browser.

There are probably loads more browsers to choose.  I'm happy with Iceweasel (Firefox).  It handles everything I throw at it, and rarely crashes, but then I'm no power user.

Did you try out the email clients?   The Evolution client has come on leaps and bounds.   It even works with Microsoft email servers these days!

cheers, a

EDIT: It looks like Google does add itself to the source.list of apt, so updates to Chrome should be retrieved along with other installed packages.

[sheddyian]

I did try Iceweasel, and it was that seemed very slow, but I'll give it another go tomorrow.

I'll probably also try Chromium, though while I'm getting used to it all I can see I'll be using Chrome for a bit longer

(Though when I started Chrome, it told me it was no longer supported on my o/s, even though the help page says Debian 6 is fine!)

Hey ho

Ian

[burakkucat]

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: nVidia Corporation NV34 [GeForce FX 5200] [10de:0322] (rev a1)

I strongly suspect that your nVidia graphics card is currently operating in legacy VGA mode, hence your disappointment with a lot of the visual aspects. You will need to download the relevant closed source nVidia driver from their site and then install it. More reading, more understanding, more . . . etc.

(Now if you had installed RHEL or one of its clones, you would not have so much of a task ahead of you because one of my colleagues at the ELRepo Project maintains the whole series of nVidia graphics card drivers in rpm format packages.    )

[roseway]

I strongly suspect that your nVidia graphics card is currently operating in legacy VGA mode, hence your disappointment with a lot of the visual aspects. You will need to download the relevant closed source nVidia driver from their site and then install it. More reading, more understanding, more . . . etc.

The default graphics driver for nVidia GPUs is nouveau, and the version in Debian Testing is a perfectly reasonable driver. But what might have happened is that the installer got a bit mixed up and installed the very basic vesa driver. That would certainly account for the symptoms. To nail this down, open a terminal and type these commands:

Code: [Select]

lsmod | grep nouveau
lsmod | grep vesa
lsmod | grep nv
These commands will tell you what graphics driver is loaded. If it's vesa, then that's what needs to be addressed. There's a third-party suite of scripts called smxi which will automate the installation of the proprietary nVidia driver (or the nouveau driver if you prefer) and that's probably the easiest way to proceed.

[silversurfer44]

Maybe I'm a bit late to the party, however, I do believe that our resident feline & indeed Roseway are definitely on the right track.
That guy that B*cat mentioned deserves a pat on the back. He does a wonderful job with the nVidia rpm package.
 I used to have to compile the nVidia driver into the kernel before the rpm came along. I alos had the same graphics board as yourself Ian and ran it with the proprietary driver with little or no problems.
So I can only echo, echo ,echo by what ever means get yourself the nVidia driver installed.
Of course if you decide to try a different flavour of Linux I can highly recommend  Mageia. It is of the rpm variety.  It is a fork of Mandriva which itself started out as Mandrake a number of years ago. I have settled with it and use all the issues from Mandrake 9.0.
I did start out with Deborah & Ian's version of Linux way back when. That was the time  when everything came as source packages which was compiled into the kernel. Oh what fun. You don't know how pampered you are these days.
Anyway get yourself the nVidia driver for your card and you will enjoy the experience I am sure.

[sheddyian]

Thanks for all your help here.

I had briefly looked at the Nividia Linux drivers, but as I wasn't sure which one to download, I'd left them alone.

Had another look yesterday, and I believe I've now got the right one, will try it later and see what happens.

It's odd though that basic screen activity seems particularly slow at times, yet MPEG playback is very good with the current driver.

Ian

[parkdale]

I recently had to install Linux Mint Debian to a Friends Ageing Shuttle box. This is after trying lots of newer 'Distros' that just either hung or would run at a snails pace!
LMDE is based on Wheezy but contains Gnome 2 updated to 'Mate' which is much faster and lighter on graphics cards.
The main problem is updating Nouveau to Nvidia drivers.
I found this site to be most helpful.
http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/717

Robin

[Mick]

I had briefly looked at the Nividia Linux drivers, but as I wasn't sure which one to download, I'd left them alone.

Had another look yesterday, and I believe I've now got the right one, will try it later and see what happens.

Ian, as others have already commented, it seems that your installation does not include the proprietary NVidia drivers, which your card needs to run smoothly, especially if you are running a desktop with 3D graphics effects.  Some cards run fine with the Nouvau drivers too, so using them may be worth a try.

As a 1st step I can't recommend strongly enough to familiarise yourself with your distro's package manager, formal and alternative software repositories and then use these for all your software installation/uninstallation and updates.  Unlike MSWindows where you have to download and update one application at a time, with Linux you should be able to udpate your whole OS and installed applications with a couple of lines on the CLI (like 'sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get autoclean').  There are GUI fronts for updating your system too, like Synaptic, Aptitude, et al.

So for starters find which repos have the desired drivers/applications, configure your machine to use them and install what you need.  I have only used Debian once so I'm not the one to offer guidance here, but besides all worthy contributors in these forums, Google is your friend in these matters.  Someone is bound to have your hardware and have already resolved and published solutions to most of your problems.

Good luck!