Hello all,

I bought this netbook in 2014 , it was certificate for linux...but it
have problems with video card GMA3600.

The netbook have a N2600 cpu with integrated GMA3600 video card, 2 Gbyte
ram , mechanic hard drive 360 Gbyte.


I have debian 9 installed i386. I installed 32bit debian version because
I hope in a more
recent video driver, but it was not userfull.

At first I installed xfce as WM , now I change it with iceWM , and the
speed is slightly more fast.

Mainly I use this netbook in the terminal, but using firefox to websurf
or watching some video it's too much slow.

What council you may give me ? I thinked to reinstall debian in amd64
and after recompile the kernel, excluding all the not userful module
inside it, but the operation take much time
( expecially reinstall debian , I may recompile the kernel on another
debian machine using cross-compiling).

Thanks

Paul

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

Paul dd wrote:

Hello all,

I bought this netbook in 2014 , it was certificate for linux...but it have problems with video card GMA3600.

The netbook have a N2600 cpu with integrated GMA3600 video card, 2 Gbyte ram , mechanic hard drive 360 Gbyte.

I have debian 9 installed i386. I installed 32bit debian version because I hope in a more
recent video driver, but it was not userfull.

At first I installed xfce as WM , now I change it with iceWM , and the speed is slightly more fast.

Mainly I use this netbook in the terminal, but using firefox to websurf or watching some video it's too much slow.

What council you may give me ? I thinked to reinstall debian in amd64 and after recompile the kernel, excluding all the not userful module inside it, but the operation take much time
( expecially reinstall debian , I may recompile the kernel on another debian machine using cross-compiling).

Sadly, the video chipset was always badly supported due to a
terrible intellectual property issue, which has not gone away.

I would strongly recommend getting a replacement. If you can
find nearly any other five year old laptop, it will be better
supported and reasonably affordable now. Replacing a spinning
disk with an SSD makes my 2011 MacBook quite useable these days.

-dsr-

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

Il 21/11/2019 22:28, Dan Ritter ha scritto:

Sadly, the video chipset was always badly supported due to a
terrible intellectual property issue, which has not gone away.

I would strongly recommend getting a replacement. If you can
find nearly any other five year old laptop, it will be better
supported and reasonably affordable now. Replacing a spinning
disk with an SSD makes my 2011 MacBook quite useable these days.

-dsr-

Yes, I know , but when I bought it , there was ubuntu 12.04 LTS
pre-installed , and I remenber the video card was supported as gma3600.

The paradoxical thing is that it was branded linux, so I bought it to
haven't linux driver problem, instead it had this serius problem with
gma3600 acceleration.
I use it mainly in the terminal with ssh , it has an autonomy of 8-9
hours, very good for me.

After I installed debian , and the driver installed is gma500 without acceleration.

However, it is wrong to make the comparison with MacBook 2011 , it was a
I5 or I7 cpu laptop based, instaed my asus eee pc 1225C is a poor N2600 netbook. I have an oldest HP elitebook ( from 2008 , without linux brand
, with cpu intel core duo,ddr2 ram memory) and it work perfectly with
debian, ubuntu , arch and freeBSD.

I don't know why asus has marketed this netbook brander linux without
video card support.


What do they do at Asus????

Paul

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

Il 21/11/2019 23:52, Paul dd ha scritto:

Il 21/11/2019 22:28, Dan Ritter ha scritto:

Sadly, the video chipset was always badly supported due to a
terrible intellectual property issue, which has not gone away.

I would strongly recommend getting a replacement. If you can
find nearly any other five year old laptop, it will be better
supported and reasonably affordable now. Replacing a spinning
disk with an SSD makes my 2011 MacBook quite useable these days.

-dsr-

Yes, I know , but when I bought it , there was ubuntu 12.04 LTS
pre-installed , and I remenber the video card was supported as gma3600.

Thinking about it, it had a partition fat32 that I later deleted.
maybe there was some bloob there? ( proprietary binary files I mean-9

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 11/21/19 3:52 PM, Paul dd wrote:

Il 21/11/2019 22:28, Dan Ritter ha scritto:

Sadly, the video chipset was always badly supported due to a
terrible intellectual property issue, which has not gone away.

I would strongly recommend getting a replacement. If you can
find nearly any other five year old laptop, it will be better
supported and reasonably affordable now. Replacing a spinning
disk with an SSD makes my 2011 MacBook quite useable these days.

-dsr-

Yes, I know , but when I bought it , there was ubuntu 12.04 LTS
pre-installed , and I remenber the video card was supported as gma3600.

The paradoxical thing is that it was branded linux, so I bought it to
haven't linux driver problem, instead it had this serius problem with
gma3600 acceleration.
I use it mainly in the terminal with ssh , it has an autonomy of 8-9
hours, very good for me.

After I installed debian , and the driver installed is gma500 without acceleration.

However, it is wrong to make the comparison with MacBook 2011 , it was a
I5 or I7 cpu laptop based, instaed my asus eee pc 1225C is a poor N2600 netbook. I have an oldest HP elitebook ( from 2008 , without linux brand
, with cpu intel core duo,ddr2 ram memory) and it work perfectly with
debian, ubuntu , arch and freeBSD.

I don't know why asus has marketed this netbook brander linux without
video card support.

What do they do at Asus????

Paul

My old desktop got hit with loss of video acceleration with its Nvidia graphics. I can not remember what model anymore but I got a lot of use
out of it for many years. About 2 years ago I passed it down to my
grandkids as a simple gaming, reading and music playing machine not
recommended for internet browsing.

You may want to see if you can find a different use for you netbook or
look at the small distributions such as tiny core linux http://tinycorelinux.net/ or puppy linux http://puppylinux.com/ or even
go back to ubuntu 12.04 but be weary of internet use.

Regards,

Eric

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

Il 22/11/2019 01:14, eric ha scritto:

My old desktop got hit with loss of video acceleration with its Nvidia graphics. I can not remember what model anymore but I got a lot of use
out of it for many years. About 2 years ago I passed it down to my
grandkids as a simple gaming, reading and music playing machine not recommended for internet browsing.

You may want to see if you can find a different use for you netbook or
look at the small distributions such as tiny core linux http://tinycorelinux.net/ or puppy linux http://puppylinux.com/ or even
go back to ubuntu 12.04 but be weary of internet use.

Puppy & similar haven't the driver too,I'll keep it with ice WM.

Thx Paul

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

Hello all,

some time ago I wrote about the asus 1225C ( with 2G of ram), a netbook
with cpu N2600 from a few years ago.
This netbook was sold by the asus branded "linux" and with a 32bit
version of ubuntu 12.04.
Unfortunately, the support of the video card was proprietary, no longer present today. In fact the gma3600 works with the gma500 driver.
( nice rubbish has made the asus )

I installed debian10 amd64 and the speed increased, but the problem of unsupported video sk remained.
The rendering of html pages was painful with firefox, good with
chromium, but both (above all chromium) consumed too much ram, even over
1G with a few tabs open.

So I tried to install lightweight browsers like falkon, midori, netsurf,
but they all had problems with html rendering.
(while consuming little memory).
I solved by installing Opera browser which, despite being proprietary,
has an impressive rendering speed and a low memory consumption.

Now in simpler operations (like light web surfing, mailing, ssh or vim
writing) it's as fast as a modern laptop.
Even videos with Opera browser are pretty fast, those at 480 finely, a
little less at 720.

The netbook is still usable for light purposes.
As a mail client I removed the thunderbird (too heavy and slow) and put it Claws Mail.
I write this post because there are still many netbooks around (often
thrown away) that instead can be used with those tricks.

Paul

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Fri, 6 Dec 2019 00:26:35 +0100
Paul dd <rxsander87@yahoo.com> wrote:

...

The rendering of html pages was painful with firefox, good with
chromium, but both (above all chromium) consumed too much ram, even over
1G with a few tabs open.

...

I solved by installing Opera browser which, despite being proprietary,
has an impressive rendering speed and a low memory consumption.

Is this really generally true, that Opera significantly outperforms
Firefox, at least in resource constrained environments? Are there any benchmarks that confirm this?

Celejar

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Fri, 6 Dec 2019 01:18:17 +0100
Paul dd <rxsander87@yahoo.com> wrote:

On 12/6/19 1:11 AM, Celejar wrote:

Is this really generally true, that Opera significantly outperforms Firefox, at least in resource constrained environments? Are there any benchmarks that confirm this?

I don't know nothing about benchmarks, I refer only to my experience.
I have no interest in sponsoring Opera Browser, but this is my experience.

Understood, thanks. My curiosity is always piqued when I hear of a
closed source software application that significantly outperforms the
best available open source ones.

Celejar

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 06/12/19 04:42, Celejar wrote:

I don't know nothing about benchmarks, I refer only to my experience.
I have no interest in sponsoring Opera Browser, but this is my experience.

Understood, thanks. My curiosity is always piqued when I hear of a
closed source software application that significantly outperforms the
best available open source ones.

I think it depends on the rendering engine.
Perhaps Opera uses the cpu instead of video rendering, but it's just my
guess.
( this netbook have a slow and bad supported GPU).
If anyone knows more, say so.

Paul

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Fri, 6 Dec 2019 17:10:29 +0100
dd <rxsander87@yahoo.com> wrote:

On 06/12/19 04:42, Celejar wrote:

I don't know nothing about benchmarks, I refer only to my experience.
I have no interest in sponsoring Opera Browser, but this is my experience.

Understood, thanks. My curiosity is always piqued when I hear of a
closed source software application that significantly outperforms the
best available open source ones.

I think it depends on the rendering engine.
Perhaps Opera uses the cpu instead of video rendering, but it's just my guess.
( this netbook have a slow and bad supported GPU).
If anyone knows more, say so.

Interesting - I have no experience with this, but Firefox does have an
option to disable the default hardware acceleration, and some sites
recommend this to solve performance problems:

https://lifehacker.com/disable-firefoxs-hardware-acceleration-to-fix-slowness-749344037
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1050822

In my Firefox, the setting is under Preferences, section Performance,
uncheck "Use recommended performance settings", and then you'll find a
(checked by default) checkbox labeled "Use hardware acceleration when available". You can try unchecking it and see what happens.

Celejar

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 12/6/19 8:16 PM, Celejar wrote:

Interesting - I have no experience with this, but Firefox does have an
option to disable the default hardware acceleration, and some sites
recommend this to solve performance problems:

https://lifehacker.com/disable-firefoxs-hardware-acceleration-to-fix-slowness-749344037
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1050822

In my Firefox, the setting is under Preferences, section Performance,
uncheck "Use recommended performance settings", and then you'll find a (checked by default) checkbox labeled "Use hardware acceleration when available". You can try unchecking it and see what happens.

Celejar

Ok, I disable it, actually it is a little faster, but opera is even faster.

From ps aux I found this option command option in Opera:

http://paste.debian.net/1119892/

As you can see firefox takes up more memory, and opera was startd with --type=renderer , maybe is an option command to disable gpu rendering.

Maybe modern browsers as firefox and chromium have more features ( for commercial purposes, the web is a huge business ) that make them heavy.

The same thing for thunderbird, a simple e-mail nntp client need
200-300Mb to start up.

Paul

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Fri, 6 Dec 2019 14:16:06 -0500
Celejar <celejar@gmail.com> wrote:

Interesting - I have no experience with this, but Firefox does have an
option to disable the default hardware acceleration, and some sites
recommend this to solve performance problems:

https://lifehacker.com/disable-firefoxs-hardware-acceleration-to-fix-slowness-749344037
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1050822

In my Firefox, the setting is under Preferences, section Performance,
uncheck "Use recommended performance settings", and then you'll find a (checked by default) checkbox labeled "Use hardware acceleration when available". You can try unchecking it and see what happens.

Celejar

Modern mass programs ( as firefox, chromium , thunderbird ) consume
many resources , ok now computers are more powerful, but the impression
is that they consume too much.

http://paste.debian.net/1119906/

Claws mail take about 2.4% memory , thunderbird ( only startup) about
12% , the total memory in 2G.

For a email and nntp client is really too much.
I think the developers of now put too many #include and libraries in
their programs.


Paul

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)