RH 8 (stupid questions)

[dishawjp]

Hi All,

I've got RH 8 up since yesterday and have some really stupid questions.  I have a new computer with a P4 1.8 CPU, 256 MB of RAM, and etc.  For some reason TuxRacer runs slower than hell and Chromium is too slow to play.  These problems happen when nothing else is running.  I would think that this hardware should be more than enough to run these little games that are packaged with RH 8.  Open Office also seems to take quite a bit of time to open.  It's certainly not unusable, but "laggier" than I thought it would be.

Any thoughts on these performance issues?

Another stupid question.  I have to say that the GUI is very nice and I guess I'll be using that rather than the command line more than in the past. Also a lot of the programs on this baby seem to require Xwindows.  Anyway, in RH 6.2 I could set backgrounds in my Xterm window.  There was a little box in the upper right corner that would allow me to do that.  I can't find that function in RH 8.

TIA for any assistance,

Jim

[mobrien_12]

What vid card?

[DJ]

I am having the same problem with Tuxracer, not that I only play games   , but it runs extremely slow on my pc also even with no programs open

Some Specs:

PIII 1.0MHz
256MB RAM
RIVA TNT2 vid card w/32MB memory

Dj

[dishawjp]

The video card is a 32 MB Jaton GEforce2 MX200 card.  Nothing too serious, but it sholdn't be a real slouch either...

Jim

[voidmain]

I have GeForce2 as well. And I have to say until I installed nVidia's drivers Tux Racer was sloooooooow for me too. Now it's as fast as any video game. You'll need it if you want to run Quake 3, RCW, UT, StarCraft, etc. Any that uses GL will run a thousand times faster with the nVidia drivers installed. Now, you have an MX card, I believe that is the one GeForce card that might give you trouble. Mine is the GeForce2 GTS w/32MB. On second thought I don't think you would have even been able to get X working if you had that one funky nVidia card. Go get the drivers from:

http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=linux_display_ia32_1.0-4191

They are pretty simple to install really. Just follow the README file at the top of the page. You'll need two RPMs, one for the kernel and one for GLX. What exact kernel version are you running?  You might want to do the kernel update and then get the matching Red Hat nVidia kernel RPM and the i386 GLX RPM. After you install them there is only one small change in your /etc/XF86Config that is required. Change "nv" to "nvidia". But follow the README to make sure everything else is right. You'll be happy with the improved performance.

[dishawjp]

void,

You're amazing!  Is there anything you don't know?

Thanks for the advice and the link.  I'll give it a go on Friday night.

Jim