[sclug] Desktop distro recommendations

[Leon Ward]

On Mon, 2004-04-05 at 10:53, Alex Butcher wrote:
> On Mon, 5 Apr 2004, Tony Sumner wrote:
> 
> -Snip-

>  
> > Not really. My RH8.0 has a driver nv that runs the Nvidia card though
> > the Nvidia driver is recommended.
> 
> ...only if you want hardware 3D. If you don't care, you don't need the
> closed nVidia drivers.

Debian: apt-get install nvidia-kernel-2.4.25-1-686-smp nvidia-glx 

(But of course you need to grab the correct ones for your
hardware/kernel)

after install, change your XF86Config to load "nvidia" not "nv"


-Nard

> RH/Fedora will use the Free nVidia driver that has no hardware 3D support.
> 
> > > just loads its sound system without asking me any questions. 
> > 
> > Quite. RH8.0 runs sound (A-bit mobo, on-board sound) in the sense that
> > I can play jazz CDs but I failed to get RealPlayer running; it says
> > stupid things like 'AC97 Codec locked at 48kHz' which is not true
> > since Media Player runs under WinME. So if I want to listen to a radio
> > programme I have to shutdown and power up Windows which is a nuisance
> > as well as morally repugnant.
> 
> Sounds as though either the driver for your sound device doesn't support
> variable output sample rates, you've got a limited sound device that doesn't
> support variable output sample rates (i.e. it's not AC'97 2.1+ compliant),
> or (possibly), some other process has a lock on /dev/dsp. Do you have KDE's
> arts or esd running, perhaps?
> 
> If it's the first or second explanation, then Windows probably works because
> its driver is doing resampling to 48KHz in software. Ugh. Nice way of
> killing overall system performance.
> 
> > > I hate the whole idea of understanding how sound works.  It should
> > > just work.
> > 
> > Quite. If you try to get help on sound from Google you are deluged
> > with impenetrable jargon, ugh. What is a codec for pete's sake [OK,
> > it's a coder/decoder but I don't want .mpeg; for radio I want .ram.
> > So it goes]
> 
> CoDec in this context refers to the input and output data format of the
> sound device; it should be in PCM (.wav) format. Back in the mists of time,
> sound cards used to deal with more than PCM encoding (have a look on the box
> of a 1995-era SoundBlaster 16 for details).
> 
> > > 3. Sees a USB mouse during installation and installs it
> > 
> > I don't know if RH installs with a USB mouse. I had a serial mouse and
> > when I bought a USB mouse I had to go into KDE, alter the mouse
> > setting (so I had two mousen) then remove the serial mouse. Odd.
> > [Mm, does the 'detecting new hardware' phase detect USB gear?]
> 
> Yup, RH/Fedora automagically works with USB mice.
> 
> > Good luck in your search. 
> > 
> > Tony Sumner
> 
> Best Regards,
> Alex.