Trying to get SiS 630 (VGA card) working

[ardvark71]

Re: Trying to get SiS 630 (VGA card) working

I must admit it's been a while since I last installed a desktop version of Linux but so far I've been utterly disappointed that even the most simple distros (like Slitaz, Vector and WattOS) don't run anywhere near as well as XP does on these old machines.

Hi...

There are some additional lightweight distros, though. I installed a copy of Lubuntu a while back and was impressed with how well it did with a system that was very close to your specs. The only main drawback for me was that the desktop was very much like Windows 95 in appearance. However, I'm sure there is some room for reconfigurability. I wrote a review of Lubuntu here, in case you're interested. However, I have no idea how well it will do with your chipset.

Regards...

[Zippy1970]

Re: Trying to get SiS 630 (VGA card) working

I think the bottleneck is the on-board SiS 630 graphics card. Linux just doesn't handle on-board graphics cards well.

I do built (non GUI) Linux webservers regularly, and one of the things always giving Linux a tremendous speed boost (and not only graphical wise, but the entire system gets a real boost), is disabling the on-board graphics card if the motherboard has one. I'm pretty sure it has to do with the graphics card sharingRAM with the rest of the system which will slow down all memory access.

Anyway, I just installed XP on this system and as I feared, it's much faster than any Linux distro I've tried so far. I mean, the difference is day and night. I will still try out some other distros because I really want to run Linux instead.

I've even tried installing Android (was actually the first thing I tried) but I can't remember exactly why that didn'work.

[dibl]

Re: Trying to get SiS 630 (VGA card) working

I've been utterly disappointed that even the most simple distros (like Slitaz, Vector and WattOS) don't run anywhere near as well as XP does on these old machines. I wonder what has happened that made Linux loose its edge...

I'll try again ...

You have a CPU designed in 1998.

You find that an OS released in 2001 runs really well on it.

You found that an OS released in 2006 ran acceptably on it.

You find that an OS released in 2010 has problems with it.

So you go back to your 2001 OS and yes, it still runs great on the hardware.

Where is the surprise here?

[Zippy1970]

Re: Trying to get SiS 630 (VGA card) working

Where is the surprise here?

Please explain why a light weight Linux version with a light weight WM would run slower on this hardware than XP. Yes, the first version of XP was released October 2001. However SP3 was released April 2008. Those two versions are not comparable. And updates are still being released today. The original XP (pre-SP) ran terrible on older/slower hardware. Yet the current version runs great.

If you want to compare apples to apples, you should compare the current version of XP to Hardy Heron, since those were released the same year. However, Hardy Heron runs like crap on this hardware while XP runs great.

So yeah - big surprise there. Any version of Linux should blow any version of Windows out of the water because Linux is fully scalable. And like I said, I'm sure the bottleneck in my case is the on-board graphics card. My experience is that Linux has always had a problem with those.

So again, it is a big surprise because I know that even the latest and greatest distro out there is much, much faster than any Windows version.

[dibl]

Re: Trying to get SiS 630 (VGA card) working

I don't know your hardware all that well -- the oldest platform that I have access to is a P4, and it runs Linux about the same as it does Win XP (SP3).

However, I think your assumptions about the inherent speediness of Linux fails to take into account the development of Linux kernel since the days when your P3 was current technology. From wikipedia, these facts are relevant:

lines of source code in Debian 2.2 (~2002) -- 59 million
"" "" "" 5 (2009) -- 324 million (and the current release is Debian 6)

lines of source code in Linux kernel 2.6.0 -- 5.2 million
"" "" "" 2.6.35 -- 13.5 million (and the current kernel 3.x is approaching 15 million lines)

So, will the P3 execute the larger kernel and many more processes in a new OS as fast as it did a 2002 Linux OS? Roughly, looking at the above figures for Debian, one would suppose you're looking at a 5X slowdown, at least, for a single-threaded CPU. If you could get your hands on a 2002 or 2003 Linux release, it would probably run marvelously on your P3. But for a 2010 release, it has to run all that code, much of which is for newer hardware, and provides no benefit to your performance.

When you run top, what process(es) are using most of your CPU? I would suppose xorg would be the worst -- the SIS chip is not famous for efficiency supporting X. If you shut down X, and use your system in console (I know that is not your objective), then do some networking and file copying and such, is it far more responsive? If so, that's another indicator that X on SIS is the main problem.

Is KDE critical to your plan? It is the most resource-intensive GUI that you could choose -- would LXDE be sufficient for your purposes?

[Zippy1970]

Re: Trying to get SiS 630 (VGA card) working

I don't know your hardware all that well -- the oldest platform that I have access to is a P4, and it runs Linux about the same as it does Win XP (SP3).

So, will the P3 execute the larger kernel and many more processes in a new OS as fast as it did a 2002 Linux OS? Roughly, looking at the above figures for Debian, one would suppose you're looking at a 5X slowdown, at least, for a single-threaded CPU.

But that's with everything compiled into the kernel. The leight weight distro's don't have that much compiled in so the size of the kernel is moot. Like I said, they are light weight and should run circles around XP on the same hardware - even older hardware.

When you run top, what process(es) are using most of your CPU? I would suppose xorg would be the worst -- the SIS chip is not famous for efficiency supporting X. If you shut down X, and use your system in console (I know that is not your objective), then do some networking and file copying and such, is it far more responsive? If so, that's another indicator that X on SIS is the main problem.

Everything is slow. I don't think it's the poor support for the SiS 630 that is causing the slowdown - I think it's the fact that Linux doesn't handle on-board graphics cards well. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've always noticed a tremendous speed-up disabling the on-board graphics and plugging in a graphics card - any card. Problem with this machine is that it's one of those all-in-one PCs (comparable to a laptop) and I can't plugin another graphics card.

Is KDE critical to your plan? It is the most resource-intensive GUI that you could choose -- would LXDE be sufficient for your purposes?

No, KDE is not critical at all. That's why I tried Slitaz (OpenBox), Vector Linux (Xfce/LXDE), PCLinuxOS (LXDE) and WattOS (LXDE). None of them were able to run on this machine with an acceptable speed.

[Zippy1970]

Re: Trying to get SiS 630 (VGA card) working

Well, so far I've tried Ubuntu (6.06, 8.10, 9.04, 9.10, 10.04, 11.10), Kubuntu (10.04, 11.04), Lubuntu (10,04), OpenSUSE LXDE, Slitaz, Vector Linux, WattOS and PCLinuxOS. They all suffer from the same graphical glitch (entire image squashed on the left side of the display) except for Ubuntu 6.06. Looking at the Xorg.0.log file, the only difference I can see is that with the non working version I see this entry in the log file:

SIS(0): Could not find/read video BIOS

while in the working Ubuntu 6.06, it says something like "Video BIOS found".

So is this a file that has gone missing in all the newer distros?

[ardvark71]

Re: Trying to get SiS 630 (VGA card) working

Hi...

I was able to find a bug report that I think might shed a clue as to the problem. Although the SiS chipset in question was a 315 Pro, it wouldn't surprise me if it also included other chipsets, including yours.

In case it helps any, here is the Manpage for SiS graphics.

It is possible there is a solution or workaround buried somewhere on the 'net for your chipset but I suspect your choice will come down to either using the VESA driver or installing Windows XP, unless you want to try and see if Opera 10 will work with 6.06, including flash player and the other enhancements. If you really want to use Linux, it might be worth a try. I'm not sure what else to suggest.

Regards...

[Zippy1970]

Re: Trying to get SiS 630 (VGA card) working

Hi and thank you for your reply.

Yes, I had seen both pages but they didn't offer a solution. The bug report is for a dual card system and is a "known" problem (known as in I've seen it discussed a few times now). I had also tried some of the options in the SiS manual - none made a difference. There are still a few more things to try though. I will report back when I have.