problems with colour depth? video playback useless and other problems...

[mistafeesh]

Hi,

I've installed kubuntu on my laptop, and it was a cinch, for the most part. I got it set up with my cross platform network ( mac and winXP) fine, and it all seemed fairly straightforward.

Sooo, I thought I'd do the same for a friend, who had a slightly better version of the same laptop, a Dell Latitude CPi. Only it's not gone smoothly at all, and now I'm pulling my hair out!

The main thing is the video output. You can see on the desktop that the colour depth is pretty low, and video playback of any kind is very lumpy indeed. As they really wanted it to watch avi videos, that's a bit of a problem! It also can't play DVDs at all.

they previously had it running windows '98, and it could show videos, but not very well. I thought that as linux is much more efficient that windows, it'd play better in this environment...

Was I wrong? It's a 366 P2 with 128mb.

PS I tried resetting the colour depth to 16 rather than 24 with these instructions:

http://www.ubuntux.org/reset-xwindows-color-depth

but it made no difference at all.

[arochester]

Re: problems with colour depth? video playback useless and other problems...

It's a 366 P2 with 128mb

The recommended minimum for running Kubuntu is 256Mb...

[askrieger]

Re: problems with colour depth? video playback useless and other problems...

You could try a Linux distro that is designed for low powered systems. The two that are said to work well are Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux. I suggest that you check them out at http://distrowatch.com/ to see if either of them has the SW needed for DVD viewing.

[arochester]

Re: problems with colour depth? video playback useless and other problems...

You could try Xubuntu:

Requirements

The current Desktop CD Xubuntu release 7.04 requires 128 MB of RAM to run or 192 MB RAM to install. The Alternate Install CD only requires 64 MB RAM to install.

When installed to the hard disk, Xubuntu requires at least 1.5 gigabytes of hard-disk space. Once installed, Xubuntu can run with 64 MB RAM, but performs much better with at least 128 MB RAM. (Wikipedia)