mandriva performance problems

[Turphy]

I'm having 2 major problems with mandriva 2010:
1. Flash player is very slow and jerky, especially when in full screen mode.
2.My music players are very slow too. Both Amarok and Banshee take deathly amounts of time to start up and then proceed to move at snails pace when I try to skip tracks or do anything other than listen, this applies to Banshee especially which goes blank screen very often.

Sorry for the double question, I figured they may be related, maybe my desktop is clogged with too much info? I've tried turning off some of the apparantly unnecessary services in the system tray + I turned the powersaving to perfomance, but I can't tell if either made any difference. Any other tips for improving performance generally.
I can't find any solutions to the flash problem on google. I've read about problems with Banshee's slowness but I like its layout structure, any suggestions for a similar but better music player?

Thanks for any help.

[dannn]

I am a newbie. However, did you mount your RAM and swap file correctly when you installed it? That's all I can think. I could be wrong...

[MikeTbob]

Can you post your system specs? How much RAM? What speed is the CPU? This could more than likely be caused by not having the proper graphics driver installed, can you post the output of these commands please (as root or use sudo)?

lspci |grep -i vga

cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf |grep -i driver

[nmset]

And also :

uname -a
top #the first 5 lines

[Turphy]

Thanks all. I figured its probably the graphics driver but when I go to set up an X server in 'Set up the graphical display' it looks like the driver is set to the right series: Nvidia Geforce fx. Checking in the terminal shows the driver as "nv", I seem to remember from another forum that this might be the inferior Nvidia driver. If so, how do I change it?
Mike - vga doesn't seem to exist on my system, "No such file or directory". Not sure what that means.

Nmset, good to hear from you again, my computer is:
Linux localhost 2.6.31.6-desktop-1mnb #1 SMP Tue Dec 8 16:20:45 EST 2009 i686 AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2600+ GNU/Linux

and "top" shows:
top - 20:02:06 up 43 min, 3 users, load average: 0.50, 0.45, 0.38
Tasks: 115 total, 3 running, 112 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 25.4%us, 3.9%sy, 0.0%ni, 68.8%id, 1.8%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 1033280k total, 939176k used, 94104k free, 33252k buffers
Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 543380k cached

[reed9]

Checking in the terminal shows the driver as "nv"

Yes, the nv driver is pretty limited and poor. I believe it is Nvidia's attempt at an open source driver.

You have two other options, the proprietary Nvidia driver, or the open source nouveau driver. If you need/want 3D acceleration so you can use a compositing window manager like Compiz or Kwin's fancy effects, you need the proprietary driver at this point. (Eventually nouveua will support hardware acceleration.)

I'm don't know exactly how to go about getting the nvidia driver in Mandriva, but there should be an option to install somewhere in the Control Center.

[nmset]

Usually, Mandriva tools for X setup readily offers to install the Nvidia proprietary driver, or perhaps you are not using the Powerpack release.

Your PC should not have much performance issues, I'm still using an Athlon XP 3 Gz smoothly.
The top output doesn't show a choking machine.

If you want to install the Nvidia proprietary driver, you'll have to install the kernel sources first :

urpmi kernel-source

and choose the one tagged 2.6.31.6-desktop-1mnb.

Next grab the relevant driver from nvidia.com

Backup your xorg.conf file.

cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.turphy

As root, switch to runlevel 3, set the executable bit on the Nvidia driver package and run it.


init 3
chmod +x <path_to_nvidia_driver>
<path_to_nvidia_driver>


If someting goes wrong, restore your xorg.conf and init 5 or reboot.

If successful, the new driver will be called nvidia and you'll have to update your xorg.conf replacing nv by nvidia.

[MikeTbob]

Mike - vga doesn't seem to exist on my system, "No such file or directory". Not sure what that means.

Issue that command as root, or use sudo, whichever your system is setup for...the problem is not that you don't have vga..........the problem is that I'm not sure of the correct path is Mandriva,,it might be /usr/sbin/lspci.
You can find it with this command.

whereis lspci

lspci: /usr/sbin/lspci /usr/share/man/man8/lspci.8.bz2

I've highlighted the path on my system, yours may be the same. So wherever it says it is,,,issue the command with the path or just use su - or sudo.

If successful, the new driver will be called nvidia and you'll have to update your xorg.conf replacing nv by nvidia.

The official driver should update xorg.conf for you, if you tell the installer to do so.

[Turphy]

The card is nVidia Corporation NV34 [GeForce FX 5200 Ultra] (rev a1).
I think I've found the driver I need but I'm having trouble configuring the kernel sources. I've found alot of info on the installing of the drivers such as - http://www.linuxforums.org/articles/...drivers_50.htm
and I've been using this page - Preparing your Mandriva kernel source . I followed the instructions for using makefile to set the Extraversion name, but to no avail. This is the kernal situation as it stands now:
[root@localhost chris]# rpm -q kernel source
package kernel is not installed
package source is not installed
[root@localhost chris]# rpm -qa | grep kernel
kernel-source-2.6.31.5-1mnb-1-1mnb2
kernel-firmware-20090604-4mnb2
kernel-firmware-extra-20090723-1mnb2
kernel-source-latest-2.6.31.6-1mnb2
nvidia-current-kernel-2.6.31.6-desktop-1mnb-185.18.36-4mdv2010.0
nvidia-current-kernel-desktop-latest-185.18.36-1.20091209.4mdv2010.0
kernel-desktop-2.6.31.5-1mnb-1-1mnb2
broadcom-wl-kernel-2.6.31.6-desktop-1mnb-5.10.91.9-2mdv2010.0
libkplatokernel6-2.0.82-4mdv2010.0
broadcom-wl-kernel-desktop-latest-5.10.91.9-1.20091209.2mdv2010.0
kernel-vserver-source-2.6.22.19-1mdv-1-3mdv2009.0
kernel-desktop-latest-2.6.31.6-1mnb2
kernel-source-2.6.31.6-1mnb-1-1mnb2
kernel-desktop-2.6.31.6-1mnb-1-1mnb2
[root@localhost chris]# uname -r
2.6.31.6-desktop-1mnb

I've attached a copy of the Nvidia installer log. Can you make anything of this?

[MikeTbob]

That error message is saying you don't have the kernel sources installed, but I see that you do have them......I'm not sure what the problem is there. You also have the nvidia modules installed.....are they loaded? Use this command as root to find out

lsmod |grep -i nvidia

If you do not see something like

nvidia 8863686 38

Then use the modprobe command to load it.

modprobe nvidia

If you get no error from the above command then you should be able to login to the desktop.
Can you post the entire /etc/X11/xorg.conf file?