Well, there's some random chatter here as well as some doubts about Nvidia
drivers, X Window System, swap files and then something else.
I proudly compiled and installed the Nvidia 1251 kernel driver and glx
libs. I say "proudly" because it's the first time I compile anything at
Linux (I actually compiled a winmodem driver also but that doesn't cout
since it doesn't work). Which brings up my first question, I read at a lot
of diff places- for ex. www.thedukeofurl.org ,that Nvidia drivers were
binary only, and open source drivers for Nvidia boards were only 2D and
sloppy. Then can someone tell me what I did just compile?
My proud quickly dissapeared as I found out that there weren't much I
could do with them. I knew they were working cause the MESA demos were
working now- but I couldn't even run the 3D screensavers. GLtron crashed
beautifully. I couldn't manage to get the drivers to 1280x1024, as the old
drivers did. And they seem a bit unstable - I had to CRTL-ALT-BKSP a few
times, even when I wasn't running anything 3D. OK, I thought. I made a quick
and dirty script that would allow me to change the drivers - basically
overwriting XF86Config-4 and set back my runlevel to 5. Which brings me to
another question - I set my runlevel to 3 in case smthing went wrong.
Suppose smthing goes wrong AFTER the driver are installed and with runlevel
set to 5. Isn't there a way to "kill" X at bootup before it starts? BTW,
I'm running XF 4.0.3 with a TNT2.
After that, I proceeded to try and install Quake2. I choose it cause I
don't consider it a treat to my Linux learning, since I don't play it any
longer (I'll explain - since I installed Mandrake it has replaced Quake3 as
my passtime) and I thought it would be easier to install. After some
problems with the symlinks I was done with install. I tried it and it
crashed quietly, a segmentation fault it told me. After half a dozen core
dumps - now I know what are that CORE files- I decided to switch to Window
Maker since I thought it could be a (low) memory related problem.
Here comes another question, a bit unrelated - swap files. Not swap
partitions, swap files. I was too lazy to set a swap partition at install
time. Later, when I saw that most of my memory was being eaten by KDE even
without any major app running -and I have 192MB , I decided to set up a swap
partition. I make it with dd, activated with makeswap and then edited the
relevant init script so that it would be automatically used at bootup. It
shows up in free or kpm but it never gets used. I don't know if that's
normal and Linux only uses a swap file in case it gets out of real memory.
Well it did got used -some 400k out of 128MB. :^) Also if someone could
explain what exactly is buffered and cached memory in Linux , I figure these
have a bit diff meaning from WinDOS.
Back to Quake2. I switched to WM and I had at least more than a few MBs of
free memory now. Heck , it still didn't run. Then I noticed that it did
initialize and the seg. fault came at the sound init part. OK, come back to
window$, run Q2 and get a cvarlist to know what is the one that disables
sound. Sound disabled, it still doesn't run , but no seg faults this time,
it just complains that it can't find opengl32. Hmmm. Reread the readmes and
HOWTOS, seem that everything is fine. After some hours (no kidding) it
turned up to be an extra space in the command line. :-^| Since Linux/*NIX
were built around C, no wonder they're so irritating about syntax.
So now I have Q2 up and running, with no sound though and the mouse pointer
popping in existence every once in a while in my screen center. I think that
the sound problem has smthing to do with the sound daemon - have to learn
about that. Q2 even runs quite fast -albeit 30% slower than in window$, I
had quite a bunch of processes and apps running as well, and it isn't full
screen. That a resource intensive program like that can be run reliably with
so many other stuff is a compliment to Linux' resource management. Q3Arena
shall be next- I have this weird dream of leaving a running Q3A demo as my
background. Perhaps with GEforce10 and a 5GHz CPU. As for now, my pride has
been restored.
Now some tips to realll newwwbiesss (TM) like me about Desktop
Environments and Window Managers. First, avoid using apps designed fro KDE
with Gnome or vice versa. Some just won't work, some will but may crash, and
of course some are OK. If you do use them, I found that is generally better
to use Gnome apps with KDE than the contrary. And try also to exit the
aplications before logging out of your environment and by using the quit
menu, not the quit button from the title bar. I was once stuck with 8
instances of GnomeChess in my desktop because of this.
Second, if you don't have a state of the art system, I found KDE and
Gnome to be quite heavy. WM (WindowMaker) while not being the most intuitive
interface out there (IMHO), gets the job done, its easy to learn, and is not
extremally minimalist (as Blackbox-that should be the GUI of choice for
older, Pentuim 1 class sys). I found myself spending a lot of time trying to
configure KDE/Gnome/Enlightment/whatever and trying to remembering which is
which. That's the price for the freedom of having a handful of GUIs
available at login time. If you have this problem too, you might just stick
with the one you find yourself most comfortable with at first sight until
you make your way around Linux.
OK, enough of typing. Any help with the afore mentioned doubts will be
greatly appreciated.
--Jeferson L. Zacco aka Wooky
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Linux registered user #221896
-------------------------------------
Computers are used to solve problems that wouldn't exist if computers
weren't invented in the first place.
