Ubuntu's GNOME GUI..

[gam3r]

I have a old PC which i put together from various parts. This includes:

Intel Celeron 800MHz
386mb ram
8mb on board video

Now a few months ago i installed ubuntu on it along with XP which was already on it, mainly because XP was so slow with the machine and i thought i should give this distro a chance.

I installed it and everything worked fine, all hardware was picked up although i had a few niggles with the connection to the router(firefox in ubuntu would only resolve IP addresses) but other than that nothing major. The only real problem was that due to my 8mb on board video everything i did on the screen "ghosted", e.g. when i minimized windows. This really made the system feel slow and clunky again like XP, so i decided to give kubuntu a shot as it made use of a lighter GUI but again i had the same problems. I also tried XFCE..

I would upgrade the graphics card on the machine but the motherboard has no AGP slot, so i have to try and find a PCI Graphics card.

The main question is, How much video memory would i need in order to run ubuntu without ghosting and slow downs(16mb?32mb?).

I'm looking for a reasonably cheap solution which would work straight off the bat with ubuntu and other distros without much tinkering.

Is it actually possible to get ubuntu running smoothly on this machine or should i start looking at other distro's like DSL?

 

[BillytheImpaler]

What resolution monitor do you have?

 

[gam3r]

1680x1050...i need something more meaty right?

 

[Rebelius]

don't really know what you need, but I'd suggest picking nVidia over ATI. I have an ATI and linux punishes me for it.

 

[Dj_Jestar]

1680x1050...i need something more meaty right?

Is this a windup? 8mb onboard gfx card would have difficulty with a POST screen at that res.

 

[dark_hag666]

What colour bit depth is it all set to?

32 bit * 1680 * 1050 = 56448000

16 bit * 1680 * 1050 = 28224000

0 bit * 1680 * 1050 = 14112000

Notice they are all above 8 MB...

 

[BillytheImpaler]

32 bit * 1680 * 1050 = 56448000

The most you'll find on Linux is 24 bpp becasue they don't count the 8 alpha channel bits.

24 bits per pixel * 1680 pixels * 1050 pixels = 42336000 bits = 5.047 megabytes

 

[Trifid]

24 bits per pixel * 1680 pixels * 1050 pixels = 42336000 bits = 5.047 megabytes

Yeah, but I make that 40.3 mib.

 

[fumbles]

What colour bit depth is it all set to?

32 bit * 1680 * 1050 = 56448000

16 bit * 1680 * 1050 = 28224000

0 bit * 1680 * 1050 = 14112000

Notice they are all above 8 MB...

KDE is not a light desktop environment.... XFCE is but you can go further, Fluxbox is ultra light weight...

My Dell Latitude LS has a 12" screen, but only 2.5MB of on board video and sound (yes they are combined)

By the same logic
800 * 600 * 24 = 11 520 000
800 * 600 * 16 = 7 680 000
800 * 600 *0 = 0 (480 000)

TNT2 Pro would be fine, dunno if it would be fully supported.

 

[BillytheImpaler]

Yeah, but I make that 40.3 mib.

24 bits per pixel * 1680 pixels * 1050 pixels = 42336000 bits

At 8 bits per byte we have 42336000 bits = 5292000 bytes

At 1024 bytes per kilobyte we have 5292000 bytes = 5167.96875 kilobytes

At 1024 kilobytes per megabyte we have 5167.96875 kilobytes = 5.04684448 megabytes

How are you getting a number so grossly out of scale? Did you forget to convert from bits to bytes?

 

[Trifid]

Ah. Sorry just woke up and forgot to divide by 8.

(I attempted it twice as well. Kind off worrying my attention then. )