Hi,

A while ago I installed Slack 10.2 on a client's new Compaq PC, and he was
so happy with it that he gave me his old Pentium II. Now whenever I have
some free time, I like giving these old machines (well, not sooooo old) a
second youth, and then give them away to someone who can use them (e. g. my
neighbour, a dancer who needs Email but can't afford a PC).

Anyway, the thing gave me a hard time wherever it could. Had to make boot
floppies, soundcard is some exotic ISAPNP monstrosity but I ended up
finding the corresponding ALSA driver. Compiling the kernel took less than
an afternoon (...), configuring X also went well, and XFCE works very well
for now.

I have a question about the graphic card. lspci -v | grep -i vga tells me
it's an ATI Technologies 3D Rage Pro. (PC is between 8 and 10 years old,
I'd say, processor is a Pentium II 233 MHz, and the thing has 128 MB RAM).

I wonder how I could get the most out of this graphic card. Running glxgears
(in XFCE) with the "ati" driver from X.org gives me an average of 360
frames/second. Whereas the ATI RAdeon card on my Siemens Fujitsu laptop
goes to 15.000 frames (with the fglrx driver).

I took a look on the ati site, but I don't know which driver to choose for
that card. I wonder if the driver in X.org is the best I could get.

Any suggestions?

Niki

On Fri, 20 Jan 2006 18:19:06 +0000, Niki Kovacs wrote:

> Hi,
>
> A while ago I installed Slack 10.2 on a client's new Compaq PC, and he was
> so happy with it that he gave me his old Pentium II. Now whenever I have
> some free time, I like giving these old machines (well, not sooooo old) a
> second youth, and then give them away to someone who can use them (e. g. my
> neighbour, a dancer who needs Email but can't afford a PC).
>
> Anyway, the thing gave me a hard time wherever it could. Had to make boot
> floppies, soundcard is some exotic ISAPNP monstrosity but I ended up
> finding the corresponding ALSA driver. Compiling the kernel took less than
> an afternoon (...), configuring X also went well, and XFCE works very well
> for now.
>
> I have a question about the graphic card. lspci -v | grep -i vga tells me
> it's an ATI Technologies 3D Rage Pro. (PC is between 8 and 10 years old,
> I'd say, processor is a Pentium II 233 MHz, and the thing has 128 MB RAM).
>
> I wonder how I could get the most out of this graphic card. Running glxgears
> (in XFCE) with the "ati" driver from X.org gives me an average of 360
> frames/second. Whereas the ATI RAdeon card on my Siemens Fujitsu laptop
> goes to 15.000 frames (with the fglrx driver).
>
> I took a look on the ati site, but I don't know which driver to choose for
> that card. I wonder if the driver in X.org is the best I could get.
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> Niki
U get 15.000 glxgears with fglrx drivers??? how is that possible.
I get 1000 - 1500 with fglrx 8.20.8 drivers on a piv 1.6, 256 mb ram and
yes i have tmpfs. Do u resize the window? let a prompt go on top of it ...
have other tweaks u mind wish to share? to answer your question yes i
think the rage 3d kernel drivers are the best u could get but that's
because ati used to be very open with specs and drivers to the oss
community in those days, IIRC

On Fri, 20 Jan 2006 18:19:06 +0000, Niki Kovacs <mickey@mouse.com> wrote:

....
>Any suggestions?

removepkg X and friends

Grant.
--
This removes the dependency from vmlinux to install, thus avoiding the
current situation where "make install" has a nasty tendency to leave
root-turds in the working directory.

Niki Kovacs wrote:

> second youth, and then give them away to someone who can use them (e. g. my
> neighbour, a dancer who needs Email but can't afford a PC).

Bit of motivation for you there then eh? ;-)

> I have a question about the graphic card. lspci -v | grep -i vga tells me
> it's an ATI Technologies 3D Rage Pro. (PC is between 8 and 10 years old,
> I'd say, processor is a Pentium II 233 MHz, and the thing has 128 MB RAM).
>
> I wonder how I could get the most out of this graphic card. Running glxgears
> (in XFCE) with the "ati" driver from X.org gives me an average of 360
> frames/second. Whereas the ATI RAdeon card on my Siemens Fujitsu laptop
> goes to 15.000 frames (with the fglrx driver).
>
> I took a look on the ati site, but I don't know which driver to choose for
> that card. I wonder if the driver in X.org is the best I could get.

This was the first graphics card I ever had. I seem to remember that
its listed in the card list for xorgconfig. I don't think it was any
good with OpenGL, but if its only for email, the desktop response was
fine AFAIR.

Niki Kovacs grumbled:
> I wonder how I could get the most out of this graphic card. Running glxgears
> (in XFCE) with the "ati" driver from X.org gives me an average of 360
> frames/second. Whereas the ATI RAdeon card on my Siemens Fujitsu laptop
> goes to 15.000 frames (with the fglrx driver).

arg!

the same on slackware 9.0, compac too, PIII 550 katmai, ati rage pro,
mach64 DRI stuff from http://www.retinalburn.net/linux/dri_xv.html

got a 142 FPS glxgears on blackbox

--
paf the dog
remove primate to reply

Niki Kovacs <mickey@mouse.com> wrote:
> I have a question about the graphic card. lspci -v | grep -i vga tells me
> it's an ATI Technologies 3D Rage Pro. (PC is between 8 and 10 years old,
> I'd say, processor is a Pentium II 233 MHz, and the thing has 128 MB RAM).

Probably a Rage 128, then.
There is a built-in "r128" in XFree86, and probably also in X.org,
it works ok, although NVidia is better. But it still is capable of DRI.
--
************************************************** ******************
** Eef Hartman, Delft University of Technology, dept. EWI/TW **
** e-mail: E.J.M.Hartman@math.tudelft.nl, fax: +31-15-278 7295 **
** snail-mail: P.O. Box 5031, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands **
************************************************** ******************

reclusive monkey <reclusive.monkey@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Niki Kovacs wrote:
>
>
>> I have a question about the graphic card. lspci -v | grep -i vga tells me
>> it's an ATI Technologies 3D Rage Pro. (PC is between 8 and 10 years old,
>> I'd say, processor is a Pentium II 233 MHz, and the thing has 128 MB RAM).
>>
>> I wonder how I could get the most out of this graphic card. Running glxgears
>> (in XFCE) with the "ati" driver from X.org gives me an average of 360
>> frames/second. Whereas the ATI RAdeon card on my Siemens Fujitsu laptop
>> goes to 15.000 frames (with the fglrx driver).
>>

the ATI Rage Pro card was released around mid-90's
It doesn't do OpenGL or anything like that, and will never compare to a Radeon...
360fps is rather good for that card.

On Fri, 20 Jan 2006 18:19:06 +0000, Niki Kovacs wrote:

--------snip
>
> I have a question about the graphic card. lspci -v | grep -i vga tells me
> it's an ATI Technologies 3D Rage Pro. (PC is between 8 and 10 years old,
> I'd say, processor is a Pentium II 233 MHz, and the thing has 128 MB RAM).

The 3D Rage Pro was a typical OEM part with 2, 4, or 8 MB VRAM back the
PII days. recycled a few myself, such as the one I am using now and on
one of the kids boxes (WinXP). HP Kayak XA PII400 512MB DRAM slack 10.2.
I don't game on it (have slamd64 MAD64 3000+ with Geforce ti4800 for that)
but its ok for xfce and all the office, email, ng, browsing etc tasks..
and chess on freechess.org (jin java client).

Say, I have 4 or 5 of these 3D Rage Pro's. Seems I can't even give them
away.....

> I wonder how I could get the most out of this graphic card. Running glxgears
> (in XFCE) with the "ati" driver from X.org gives me an average of 360
> frames/second. Whereas the ATI RAdeon card on my Siemens Fujitsu laptop
> goes to 15.000 frames (with the fglrx driver).

360 fps? eh? or 3.6? not on that chip and a PII233. I get about 20 fps
and I have a much beefier system

> I took a look on the ati site, but I don't know which driver to choose
> for that card. I wonder if the driver in X.org is the best I could get.
> the x.org has been usable

In my experience, stick with the x.org ati driver. ATI has poor legacy
support - its the RAGE PRO on their list - and doesn't support this chip
on linux. Even in WinXP its best as a basic office card. Gaming
performance is ghastly. well...baldur's gate and starcraft aren't too bad
on it... check out http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/ and see if tweaking it
is worth the effort.

I think their OEM deals kept them alive while 3dfx and nividia ruled the
gaming market. I'm swapping the kid's out with a Nvidia TNT2 32MB AGP 4X
- a kick ass card for its day - and still a very nice card for basic
gaming.

goarilla wrote:

> On Fri, 20 Jan 2006 18:19:06 +0000, Niki Kovacs wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I wonder how I could get the most out of this graphic card. Running
>> glxgears (in XFCE) with the "ati" driver from X.org gives me an average
>> of 360 frames/second. Whereas the ATI RAdeon card on my Siemens Fujitsu
>> laptop goes to 15.000 frames (with the fglrx driver).
>>
>> I took a look on the ati site, but I don't know which driver to choose
>> for that card. I wonder if the driver in X.org is the best I could get.
>>
>> Any suggestions?
>>
>> Niki
> U get 15.000 glxgears with fglrx drivers??? how is that possible.
> I get 1000 - 1500 with fglrx 8.20.8 drivers on a piv 1.6, 256 mb ram and
> yes i have tmpfs. Do u resize the window? let a prompt go on top of it ...
> have other tweaks u mind wish to share? to answer your question yes i
> think the rage 3d kernel drivers are the best u could get but that's
> because ati used to be very open with specs and drivers to the oss
> community in those days, IIRC

Hmm... my Radeon X200 (notebook) using fglrx gives me under 80fps with the
processor close to melting (amd mt-40). But I've had problems getting it
even this far. I got it to work enough to give me the proper widescreen
resolution and then left it alone.