Paul Tansom wrote:
> OK, not necessarily just Lucid, but things have changed with my upgrade. I'll
> quickly work through a bit of history in case it helps. I'm basically curious
> to know how the default behaviour of the desktop should be so I know what the
> actual quirks are! This is on an HP Mini 2133 in case it is relevant.
>
> This install started as Ubuntu 9.04 netbook remix when I wanted to get
> something more recent than the preinstalled Suse (which was out of date before
> I got it!). The Suse install was a nightmare partly because I could never get
> it to update anything due to the commercial restrictions on access to the
> repositories. Novell/Suse told me to talk to HP and HP told me to talk to
> Novell/Suse, so although I like the netbook, my experience of a preinstalled
> commercial Linux distribution has matched my low opinion of Red Hat!
>
> Anyhoo, all went well bar the UNR interface running so painfully slowly as to
> make it unusable. Thankfully the standard Gnome desktop runs nicely and I
> prefer that to the UNR interface anyway.
Sorry I can't help you with all of the panel/icon stuff, I don't have an
Ubuntu machine to hand at the moment. What I wanted to say was that I
have a 2133 also.
The UNR interface will always run badly as there are no decent 2D or 3D
accelerated graphics drivers for the Via Chrome chipset on Linux which
means all of the 2D accelerated rendering for the UNR interface has to
be done on the CPU which isn't up to it. The normal Gnome interface will
run fine without using 3D desktop effects.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport/Machines/Netbooks#HP%202133%20Mininote
Ubuntu uses the OpenChrome drivers. Via themselves provide both open
source and proprietary drivers for the graphics chip in the Mininote
2133 for Ubuntu but they're always at least 1 Ubuntu release behind, are
really poor quality (so I hear at least) and do really bad things (like
only do MPEG acceleration as root).
Proprietary:
http://www.viaarena.com/Drivers.aspx (website seems broken atm)
Via Open Source:
http://linux.via.com.tw/support/downloadFiles.action
The OpenChrome project breaks all of this down on their wiki:
http://www.openchrome.org/trac/wiki/About
I ran the pre-installed SUSE 10.3 and hit the same problems with package
installation as you: namely that there weren't any available. Also I
found the system painfully slow. I'm told that the ones pre-installed
with Windows Vista were no better. I was worried I'd wasted my money but
was relieved to find it was a lot faster under Ubuntu though it's never
going to feel particularly snappy with a Via CPU. I really like the 2133
in all ways apart from the fact that the graphics performance really
stinks :)
Regards,
Adam Sweet
--
http://blog.adamsweet.org/
