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    several things re. amd64 gutsy

    greetings!

    just installed the amd64-ized gutsy on a new machine here, and a few observations/questions come to mind.

    was able to find a beta of the 64-bit opera 9.50, which seems to work and which to me is crucial. don't know why the regular version doesn't work -- 32-bit versions of my other applications seem to be just fine (especially textmaker out with which i could not live).

    video -- geforce 8400, 256mb -- seems pretty slow, even for regular stuff. nv driver is installed. am worried, though, about making things worse by installing the closed drivers. any field reports? any tips?

    i've also noticed that glxinfo reports that no glx support -- not even software support -- is installed. can this be right?

    something puzzling: every couple of seconds the hard drive led blinks. it's a 500-gig wd sata drive. wondering if there's some media-present check or something going on, and if there's a way to disable this for the hard drive. probably does no harm, but it's annoying.

    two more general issues: for almost a decade i've used the kde classic hicolor icon theme. i like it. it's non-fussy. and it appears to have been deprecated. anybodyt know where it can be downloaded? i spent an hour on kde-look with no success.

    and finally. the drive came with XP on it, which i preserved for dual-boot -- occasionally have to run a winapp, and i've seen vista (and will have to live with that horrifying memory for the rest of my life!) and figure that XP with sp2 is probably as good as windows will ever get. anyway. i once thought that it would be possible to point vmware to an existing windows installation and run it in a virtual machine, but this appears not to be the case. so i'm wondering if it is possible to point wine to applications on the ntfs windows partition and run winapps that way, even to the point of letting wine use the existing dlls and so on. this is noncritical, but it would be cool if i could make it happen.

    any observations and advice would be greatfully received.

    thanks!

    #2
    Re: several things re. amd64 gutsy

    Originally posted by dep

    video -- geforce 8400, 256mb -- seems pretty slow, even for regular stuff. nv driver is installed. am worried, though, about making things worse by installing the closed drivers. any field reports? any tips?
    No field report for 8400, however here's one for 8800GTS. If you decide to install the proprietary driver, I would advise using the Envy script installer from here rather than the Restricted Driver Manager.


    i've also noticed that glxinfo reports that no glx support -- not even software support -- is installed. can this be right?
    Yep, that's the way it is -- no GLX for the nv driver, AFAIK.


    something puzzling: every couple of seconds the hard drive led blinks. it's a 500-gig wd sata drive. wondering if there's some media-present check or something going on, and if there's a way to disable this for the hard drive. probably does no harm, but it's annoying.
    Most *nix-based OS's do a regular pulsing of the hard drive/filesystem -- I doubt there's anything amiss. If you want to see the running processes, in descending order of activity, open the Konsole and run
    Code:
    top
    and you can see what's going on when you THINK you aren't doing anything with the computer.


    two more general issues: for almost a decade i've used the kde classic hicolor icon theme. i like it. it's non-fussy. and it appears to have been deprecated. anybodyt know where it can be downloaded? i spent an hour on kde-look with no success.
    Sorry, I dunno either.


    i once thought that it would be possible to point vmware to an existing windows installation and run it in a virtual machine, but this appears not to be the case. so i'm wondering if it is possible to point wine to applications on the ntfs windows partition and run winapps that way, even to the point of letting wine use the existing dlls and so on. this is noncritical, but it would be cool if i could make it happen.
    I have heard that also, but have not tried it myself. My experience with wine was a disappointment -- I have a proprietary MS Visual FoxPro database, and wine couldn't hack it. However, VMWare Player 2.0 (64-bit version) installs flawlessly on Gutsy 64-bit, and runs my Win XP virtual machine beautifully -- I benchmarked it at 95% the speed of a native installation on Win XP on the same hardware. So I'm sold on VMWare Player to take care of Windows business. You can see some screenshots of it up in the Image Gallery.

    Hope this is of some help!

    Comment


      #3
      Re: several things re. amd64 gutsy

      yup -- i used envy. good thing, too: it installed a bunch of developmental stuff that i like to have around, anyway, but that i didn't see among the choices with adept. (as you can tell, i went ahead with the driver install . . . seems fine, and envy is one masterful little piece of software! good results so far, not least being ablut 3000 fps in glxgears, which ain't world-record stuff, but it will run the gl xscreensaver modules well, i think.)

      beginning to think i'd like to find something halfway between wine and vmware. the fact that vmware does not appear able to point to an existing windows install is to me a little silly, because doing so is just so obvious. (my view of vmware would improve if it supported OS/2. i did, when vmware was first out in 1999, make a virtual machine just so i could install windows 3.1 with microsoft bob, to make a funny screenshot for a book i wrote, "practical kde." so far as i know, no one has repeated this feat. probably because who would want to?)

      re. the hard drive accesses. top reports nothing unusual, which is no surprise. i remember way back when -- caldera 1.x, maybe -- when the CD reader flashed every few seconds as part of an early automount thing. if the swapfile is being maintained or something, it makes sense. but even gutsy i386 didn't do this. so i am a little puzzled still.

      am utterly dreading trying to find some old distribution CD so i can get my icons back. i appreciate the kde artists' desire to put forth the latest and greatest -- but some of us get set in our ways . . .

      anyway. thanks very much. good advice entirely.

      Comment


        #4
        Re: kde classic icons

        solved this one, too. found 'em in the kdeartwork rpm on CD 4 of suse 10.0. extracted 'em to a directory in my ~ and went to kcontrol to install 'em. it said nothing doing. so i just brute-force copied the kdeclassic icon directory i'd extracted into /usr/share/icons, where the kde icons are located. then fired up kcontrol again. now it recognized 'em but didn't want to apply them. looked at the advanced tab and discovered that it wanted a couple of sizes not available in kdeclassic. changed those sizes. now it applied, and i have nice, simple, elegant icons again.

        just noting this for anyone who wants a kde-looking kde . . .

        Comment

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