Rogério Brito wrote:
May I ask which processor and video card you are using, and at what resolution are you running in both operating systems? The reason I ask is that my desktop exhibits not only the same slow down symptoms with websites, but also very noticeable slow redraw of firefox windows (and GTK2 app windows) when switching workspaces. All this with unstable/sid and debian stock kernels 2.6.10 or 2.6.11 and blackbox or openbox.Indeed. One thing that has puzzled me is that scrolling in www.macslash.org is simply *slow* on my system while I am using Debian. On the other hand, when I boot Windows 2000 SP4 on this very same machine, I have no problems with slow scrolling on that site. I wouldn't even notice that something were different with that particular site. Are there others that see the same behaviour under Debian? I have not tested other distributions, unfortunately. Thanks in advance for any feedback, Rogério.
Initially I thought that my P4 2.4Ghz, 512MB RAM was starting to show its age, but a recent upgrade to a A64 3000+ with 1 GB ram (ASUS A8V) didn't seem to make things any better in this area. This all being used with a ATI Radeon 9200 (also tried an older ATI 9000 pro) driving a 20" flat panel at 1600x1200.
This all started with the purchase of a new laptop. All of these signs and symptoms became very noticeable after recently purchasing a new IBM Thinkpad X40 and installing debian unstable. It's a slower machine with half the ram: Pentium-M 1.5Ghz driving a 12" lcd at 1024x768. The video card is on board Intel 855gm with 8mb shared memory.
I just booted up the laptop while wrting this expecting to get the same super slow scrolling of www.macslash.org and expecting the CPU to be pegged at 100%. It's noticeably faster on may little laptop, cpu increases to a max of 50%. Plus, swicthing workspaces with openbox or blackbox results in instantaneous window redraw, with no sluggishness.
I'm wondering if this might be a video card issue. Maybe the Intel open source drivers are better? Maybe X.org fixes many of these issues? Dunno. I tried running the 20" flat panel at 1024x768, but that didn't cure anything.
My current video card needs for linux are excellent 2d to drive a 20" panel at 1600x1200 (and a possible upgrade to 1900x1200 in the future) with a fanless adapter. A quick Google search shows that a Matrox g450 is a good chioce, but there might be some performacne issues with driving hi-res displays. My other option is to wait 'till the Open Graphics team actually produces a card sometime next fall.