Silly questions (speed, fonts, kernel)
Hey all,
My mother-in-law-to-become has won a laptop somewhere. It's a no name
ECS A907 or something the like, which I managed to get to run X just
fine (after three days of poking around, and with lots of help from
dga.co.uk/howto and winischhofer.net). While the result is definitely,
ehm, useful, some things still bothered me. I know the questions are
of quite some stupidity, but still I was hoping for someone to answer...
* The machine has a 500Mhz Transmeta Crusoe processor and only 112 MB
RAM. Those aren't really high specs indeed, but it really runs
*terribly*
slow. Of course, Gnome 2 isn't the best DE for a slow machine like this,
but definitely it (or KDE 3) should be used (I don't think I can get
the owner of the laptop to use Fluxbox or the like). Mplayer even
refuses
to play DVD's because my machine "is TOO SLOW" (like I should be
reminded
of that).
Is that normal? If the thing can't play DVD's because of its speed, why
would it come with a DVD-player? What could I have overlooked? Are there
any steps I could undertake to have it running more efficiently?
* From my own (desktop) machine, I remember beautiful fonts. I just
apt-getted lots of them, and without any configuration needed, fonts
were rendered with (well...) breath-taking antialiasing and the like.
The laptop, however, seems to miss that on some points. While the
desktop
has the antialiasing, apps such as Galeon don't. And I must say, I'm
quite
overwhelmed by the way fonts are handled (fontconfig? xft2? xfs?
defoma?).
Once more: what could I have overlooked?
* I guess warnings when booting the kernel aren't really something to
worry about, but still, it bothers me that they're there. All the
char-major xxxx warnings -- are they just remnants of the stock 2.2.20
kernel? What purpose did they serve? Can I just comment them out in
/etc/modules.conf?
Anyway. Once more, my apologies for the possibly too trivial questions.
And thanks in advance for any tips or answers.
Greets,
Tom
--
"Das Gericht will nichts von dir. Es nimmt dich auf,
wenn du kommst, und es entlässt dich, wenn du gehst."
Reply to: