20 Nov
2008
20 Nov
'08
12:21 p.m.
BTW - I'm not suggesting only installing a single distro. you have
enough disk space to install a few and try out support for the machine
in each, just to see how it goes. Ain't grub grand? ;-)
- Mark
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 6:38 AM, Mark Knecht <markknecht(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hey Dave,
Sounds like you're making pretty good progress. Congrats You'll
have to report back some benchmark values when you get it set up to
your liking.
I cannot speak to Ubuntu. I've never run it. However I've run
Gentoo 64-bit for a few years now. All I can say is that while 64-bit
Linux works, and works well, there are a lot of real world limitations
in terms of accessing media from the web. While no where near as bad
as they used to be you will likely run into issues with Java and Flash
under 64-bit, and the decoders for things like Windows media file
types are almost always a bit more difficult than on our 32-bit
machines. Again, no where near as bad as they used to be, but not as
good as the 32-bit versions.
Even though I'm purchasing 64-bit processors these days I'm not
installing 64-bit anymore. I have one machine to test but 32-bit the
rest of the way around. There's nothing about your system specs that
demands 64-bit (IMO) so consider whether you really want it.
Cheers,
Mark
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 6:28 AM, Dave Phillips <dlphillips(a)woh.rr.com> wrote:
Greetings, fellow LAUyers,
To recap: I recently purchased a Hewlett-Packard G60-125NR notebook, a
machine based on an AMD Turion 2 GHz CPU, with 3G RAM, a 250G hard disk,
and an on-board nVidia 8200M (essential for my work). Sound comes from
an nVidia chipset based on the dreaded Intel HDA codec.
My experience so far has been illuminating. I first tried to install the
64-bit versions Ubuntu 8.10 and Arch Linux, both of which froze during
the installation procedure. Some research indicated that the likely
culprit was the Atheros wifi driver, so I tried the brokenmodules option
but still got no joy. I found reports that Mandriva and OpenSUSE 11.0
worked, and since OpenSUSE downloaded faster I gave it a whirl. The
brokenmodules option seemed to do the trick, and after a while I had a
new Open SUSE 11.0 (64-bit) installed on the machine. Alas, I couldn't
get the official nVidia driver to work, which left me with an
unsatisfactory vesa framebuffer display. A little more Googling revealed
that indeed some users were enjoying Ubuntu 8.10 on this hardware, so I
tried again, this time with the i386 installer. Voila, in short order I
had a new Ubuntu system installed, with working 3D acceleration from the
nVidia closed-soure driver.
On to the audio. Intrepid doesn't create an audio group by default, so I
had to do the dance to add that group and myself to its users. That got
me to realtime JACK performance, though I'm still suffering excessive
xruns at 17.4 ms latency (-p 256 -n 3 -r 44100). I don't plan to use
that chipset as a primary audio interface anyway (I'm in the market for
a USB interface now), so for the present time I'll live with it. Btw,
the audio device is on IRQ 19, probably not the optimal position.
I have one more permissions problem to resolve (access to /dev/nvidiactl
is forbidden to the normal user) then I believe I'll have my target
machine, i.e. a portable box that can run AVSynthesis (OpenGL + Csound).
Btw, I've already scrapped the GNOME desktop in favor of fluxbox (of
course), but I'd certainly like to hear from other Ubuntu users
regarding any other recommended streamlining. For instance, I'd like to
junk pulseaudio and compiz completely but I'm not sure how to do it.
One question: Should I go ahead and install the UbuntuStudio packages ?
I have the rt-kernel, it seems I could just go ahead and install the
rest. Any reasons not to do so ?
Best,
dp
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