[dundee] Graphics cards, Firefox and Thunderbird.

[Andrew Clayton]

Malcolm. If you wish to post a new unrelated message to the list,
please don't reply to some random message as it knackers up the
threading (mail is normally threaded on the Message-Id and In-Reply-To
headers.
.
And Paul, don't get me started on top posting!

On Wed, 19 Mar 2014 20:08:39 +0000, Paul Sutherland wrote:

> Could it be a memory issue?  20 FF tabs is the equivalent to running
> 20 Firefox applications?  I had a similar issue with a VM recently

Hmm, not really. Once firefox is loaded then extra tabs will have
overhead but not the same as the whole of firefox again. The amount of
memory each extra tab takes up will depend largely on its content.

I currently have about 60 tabs, and with all the tabs just recently
loaded firefox is sitting at between 700-800MB. A rough estimate would
be about 10MB a tab in my case.

> with Chromium and htop showed the I was red lining the memory - I
> added another 1GB and the problem went away.
> 
> Paul
> 
> On 19 Mar 2014, at 19:31, Malcolm <malcolm at wxlr.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> > I'm struggling to work out why my computer won't load firefox and
> > thunderbird. 
> > 
> > I was running PCLinuxOS and if I tried to start either FF or TB the
> > computer would lock up. The mouse would still move but clicking it

[snip]

> > My cure has to been to avoid FF/TB and to this end I've installed
> > OpenSuse as I've used it before and it has Kmail instead of TB. It
> > also has FF on it so I thought I'd give it go and it works OK but
> > with the occasional glitch. 

Did you try firefox and or thunderbird on OpenSUSE?

> > Which leads me to the graphics card part, once so far the screen
> > has partly disintegrated into something like a magic picture and
> > the clicking the mouse on anything achieves nothing. The graphics
> > card is the same one as came with the computer, a Dell Inspiron
> > 530, and is a GeForce 8300. 

Hmm, using the Nvidia binary drivers or nouveau?
 
> > Finally the point of my post: Is it possible that the graphics card
> > is faulty/overheating/possessed? £20 will get me one from Ebay so
> > it's not that bad if I have to buy one to eliminate this
> > possibility. 
> > 
> > Added as it might be relevant: I frequently have about 20 FF
> > windows open at any one time.

So you can get Firefox to run without locking the machine up? Is this
under SUSE?

> > Any other suggestions for a cure are welcome.

If you do go for a graphics card, make sure it's a AMD/ATI/Radeon, but
not the latest and use the open source drivers and not fglrx.

If you look at the Radeon man page (man radeon) it has a big list of
supported cards, I'd suggest something between CEDAR and CAYMAN

Also http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/ (though not sure
how up to date that is).

Andrew