Re: system seems slow, and graphics look bad.

[Gleef <dzol virtual-yellow com>]

On Wed, 14 Apr 1999, Pathbreaker wrote:
> Hi
> 	I've got gnome with enlightenment installed on a redhat 5.2 system. I've
> got an intel pentium at 200Mhz and 32 mb of ram. I'm runnning x in 16 bit
> mode. The system seems to be slow. The background image seems very blurred.
> (I tried various images). What should I do?

Your biggest speed boost would probably be to get more memory.  The
various background services that RedHat run can be from 2-10MB, X11 will
take from 8-15MB, the basic GNOME stuff (gnome-session, panel, gmc, etc)
from 4-8MB, enlightenment 1MB.  So your base system without running
anything is taking from 14-32MB.  On top of that your system wants some
cache space if disk access is going to be zippy.  Running a memory hog
like Netscape could remove another 11-25MB chunk of memory, sending you
directly into swapping.

Baring that, you should pay close attention to what you run, how big it
is, and how much you need it.  The programs ps, top, or gtop can be very
useful for this.  

Some people report speed problems due to mixmatched X servers.  If this is
the case, you should see the programs running along pretty quick, but
everything gets slow and jumpy when you try to move windows around.  If
you get this, open up the machine and see exactly which video card you
have, and what the numbers on the big chip of the video card are, and
see if you can use an X Server that supports whatever 2D graphics
accelleration your card offers.  http://www.xfree86.org has some resources
to help you there.

As for the blurring, if you use a background that is smaller than your
screen, and tell enlightenment to maximize the height and/or width, it
will use Imlib to scale the image to the full screen.  As with any
digital image magnification, this can lead to a slight blurring effect.
If this is a problem, make sure your image size matches your screen size,
or tell enlightenment not to scale the images.  You might have better luck
magnifying the images manually with the Gimp, and using its sharpen
feature to minimize the blurring.

Best of Luck,
-Gleef