ThinkPad 600X Experiences with F8T3

[chris at idlelion.net]

On Wed, 10 Oct 2007, Adam Jackson wrote:

> On Wed, 2007-10-10 at 11:27 -0500, chris at idlelion.net wrote:
>> On Wed, 10 Oct 2007, Adam Jackson wrote:
>>> On Wed, 2007-10-10 at 10:06 -0500, chris at idlelion.net wrote:
>>>> Video:
>>>> Upon opening computer (or really any Nautilus windows), the background of
>>>> the window is blue, with a white box around each object.
>>>>
>>>> Small vertical line segments appear on the screen near the edges of where
>>>> windows close.
>>>>
>>>> Dragging a window across the left edge of the screen and downward makes
>>>> the right-most column of the screen show a tiny portion of the window.
>>>> Dragging up-and-left or right does not produce the artifact.
>>>
>>> ThinkWiki tells me this laptop has a neomagic graphics chip.  Do you see
>>> these artifacts when using the vesa driver?
>>
>> Thanks Adam,
>>
>> Yep. It's a NM2360 or NeoMagic MagicGraph 256ZX with 4MB. It worked fine
>> with FC6.
>
> That's really bizarre.  The driver hasn't changed since then.
> Presumably the server's just doing something different now?
>
> Do you have X log files to compare from FC6 and F8t3?

Hm. No. I can make some I suppose, but since the driver "works" enough for 
me to see what's going on, I don't expect there will be any notable 
differences.

>> 1) How do I test the vesa driver?
>
> Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf, change the word 'neomagic' to 'vesa'.

OK. Wow. First noticeable change was that the welcome screen went from 
1024x768 to 800x600 and from blue to green. In fact, the entire GUI seemed 
to shift hue by 120 degrees: blues became greens, greens became reds, and 
reds became blues.

Changing the display from 24-bit to 16-bit color fixed the hues. I would 
like to use all of my screen, though, so the vesa driver is not a viable 
long-term solution.

>> 2) Is there a way to benchmark
>> performance? (If the vesa driver seems snappy, I'll just use that
>> instead.)
>
> yum -y install gtkperf, and compare runs.  The vesa driver will be
> completely unaccelerated, and in particular you won't get Xv, but it
> might be fast enough for you depending what you're doing.

Running with the neomagic driver, 1024x768, 24-bit color gave me about 84 
seconds. Vesa, 800x600, 16-bit gave me 67 seconds. Hmm.

I also did an update and the neomagic driver still has serious issues. 
Should I post logs? Take pictures? What would help?

Chris