DPM
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Billtoo, thanks for testing. The results are strange doesn't really follow the claim that low-->auto-->high power also means low-->auto-->high performance; and from LateAdopter's result the performance definitely isn't higher than the "high" profile.
Note: if you want to use glxgears for testing with radeon, you have to specify vblank_mode=0 like this:
otherwise radeon driver always sync the drawing to the vertical sync so the FPS is almost always 60 or 50 (that's 60Hz or 50Hz, depending on where you live).
The conclusion I get from the tests kindly done by Billtoo and LateAdopter is that for DPM, low/auto/high doesn't make any difference in terms of performance; but it does make a difference in terms of power consumption (=temperature). This is odd (I would expect better performance = more power) but that's what the result speaks. Alex (agd5f) claimed that DPM has better performance because of the ability to ramp up the GPU clock, but I haven't seen it on mine, I don't see it on LateAdopter's and I don't see it on Billtoo's. Its interesting to note from LateAdopter's comment that DPM doesn't always work too
I tested using glxgears (admittedly a poor test tool) and 3D game Scorched3D. One can also test using other first-person-shooter games like Urban Terror, etc. However kirk and I would also like to suggest that if 3D performance is important, one can't go wrong with AMD proprietary driver (fglrx aka Catalyst) - that's the only way to go; and this is true for all GPUs except Intel.
VDPAU
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Billtoo wrote:I played a video at cnn set to low and then again set to high, the
quality of the video was fine both times, I could here the fan running
at both settings while the video played.
I suppose you play the video using Flash. I just found out yesterday that while the DPM settings doesn't matter, installing VDPAU *does* make a difference. Not on video quality, but more on temperature (=power consumption). Apparently for my radeon the VDPAU works, because without it my temperature will be 10degrees higher when playing Flash video.
Savefile
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chapchap70 wrote:]
Make sure to use a new savefile or save folder while testing.
Well that's no fun
Well I don't say that using existing savefile won't always work. The savefile I use today harks back from the days of 600 alphas. But when you're doing testing, if you encounter breakage it will be difficult to pinpoint the cause; because old savefile *may* contain cruft that stops the newer Fatdogs from working (remember, the savefile has higher priority than the basesfs, whatever override/configuration settings and/or newer libs you put into the savefile will hide and/or disable files of the same name from the basesfs). As for me, I happen to know exactly what has changed, so I can anticipate this kind of breakage by removing offending old files - but most people won't know how to do this. So the accurate note is that "using old savefile with newer version may or may not work, depending on various uncontrollable conditions", but this is too long for most people; it is easier to just say "don't use old savefile when you upgrade"
I thought Kino was the new editor by looking at the screenshot.
Thanks, that screenshot needs updating
Edit: Clicking on the thunderbird icon launced the new Seamonkey 2.21. I had thunderbird set up as default email. thunderbird-spot still worked in terminal although I have to reconfigure some things.
Hmm, need to look again at that that thunderbird pet is doing. Thanks for reporting.
Lxpanel
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Gobbi wrote:Thank's kirk , Jamesbond and everyone following the project for going forward with development of Fatdog .
I tried first a frugal install , but it didn't work on my desktop so I burned a DVD RW and chose ' problematic Radeon cards ' and it booted fine .
You can get these special settings by looking at isolinux.cfg and copy them over for your own grub/syslinux/grub4dos installation so that they will work with your frugal install menus too.
That being said, what radeon card do you have? What kind of crash do you get? I remember we had similar problems during 620 release, and I though we fixed it with the "radeon workaround" stuff.
I've changed theme and font from Control Panel/Desktop/Chtheme GTK theme chooser and lxpanel crashed , that is it's appearance changed with strange colours in it .
I've got to try this; but lxpanel has always been a pain. It is nice going if you can get it set up properly, but to reach that ...
I've set a new wallpaper and after that due to lxpanel crash I restarted X . Lx panel turned normal again but the wallpaper turned back to the default one .
Odd. How did you set-up the wallpaper? Do you use the RAM layer?
These two bugs happend just once , in the beginning.
Trying to change values in lxpanel settings ( icon size , height or font custom colour ) made crash lxpanel but it recoverd after a few seconds with the initial settings .
That's the magic of Fatdog
No, seriously lxpanel crashed very often in our earlier tests (and when we make some changes that it doesn't like) that we decided to implement some sort of "lxpanel watchdog" that will automatically restart it if it crash. It doesn't happen with kirk, but for me, lxpanel will crash 3 out of 5 times if I close Firefox. Yes, after I'm done with Firefox I close it; and lxpanel goes down with it for no reason ... hence the watchdog
Yeah when it crashes it doesn't have the chance to save its settings; so when the watchdog restarts it lxpanel reverts back to the previous setting, which in retrospect is good because if it keeps the settings that causes it to crash in the first place, that wouldn't be nice ...
EDIT: Why don't we ditch lxpanel and replace it with something else? We actually tried this in one or the earlier internal alphas (between me and kirk) - can't remember in 610 or 620 days. We replaced lxpanel+openbox with xfce and found that it was no match in terms of speed and memory/cpu consumption compared to openbox+lxpanel. It had its share of crashes too. So despite its shortcomings, lxpanel stayed, for now.
The fact that lxpanel returned to Puppy version could explain a few things because changing values in lxpanel was always a pain until 610 ( I had to use the complete pet from the repository to do it ) .
No we didn't revert lxpanel to an older version. The lxpanel in 630 is the same as in 621/620; the difference is that we fix the XDG menu following the discussion here:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 710#706710 to show the same menu structure as earlier Fatdogs and thus Puppy too. lxpanel in 610 and older were version 0.3.8.1 and the menu structure was fixed - you can't add new categories as such. The lxpanel in 620 onwards are fully XDG compliant and you can add new menus, new categories etc. Assuming it doesn't crash first
Xorg.conf
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LateAdopter wrote:I see that dri2 and glamoregl are loaded in xorg.log but it isn't used.
That's interesting, I thought it would be automatically used if the driver is available. At the very least dri2 should be automatically used.
But Fatdog does not use xorg.conf.
If I create an xorg.conf, will fatdog use it? Or is there a better way of enabling it?
You can create xorg.conf in /etc/X11 and Fatdog will use it; but the recommended way of doing this is to run xorgwizard (you can run this from existing X session, no need to quit to terminal) and specify the radeon driver. After you save, you will get a file called 20-gpudriver.conf in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d. Edit this file and add the appropriate options - AccelMethod in your Device section; and add additional Module section to load both modules.