superllama
Mon May 19, 2014 4:56:47 pm
I just put Zorin 8 on my dad's old Sony VAIO as an alternative to XP, and things are more or less working, but I've got three big problems (two of which are probably not the distro's fault) that I've tried for days to fix with no success... I really expected to like this distro and so far I've been slightly disappointed with the results, but I thought I'd give it a chance and at least post my issues here on the forum in case somebody knows what to do.
First off, likely by no fault of zorin or ubuntu but rather the radeon drivers, OpenGL doesn't seem to run very well with the old X300 in the machine, despite the card being able to run windows DirectX just fine. It runs compiz decently, but when I tried to run my dad's favorite game, Doom 3 (which the computer ran just fine under windows xp) it only barely played at the lowest possible settings. This is the native version of Doom 3 too, the wine version only got like 5 fps. I've tried various video drivers-- the old card isn't supported by fglrx and the official legacy driver seems to be 64-bit only, leaving only the open-source radeon driver which is what I'm using now. I've also had compiz freeze when I tried using the desktop cube while a window was animating a close, I guess that could also be opengl-related-- plus sometimes the window previews from awn leave a corner on the screen which doesn't go away unless I bring up the desktop cube.
Second, also probably not the distro's fault; Alsa detects the ALC880, but does not output to the center/sub or the rear speaker jacks at all. I've tried lots of different settings, including changing the model to 3stack and 3stack-digout and various things like that, but I only ever get it to play through the front speakers, even when the sound configuration screen pretends to see 5.1 surround sound.
Third-- and I suspect other distros wouldn't do this-- when booting it shows the nice blue zorin logo screen for about 30 seconds and then shows a totally black screen for a minute and a half before finally showing the desktop. During this time, just about nothing is happening, and I can ctrl+alt+F1 and mess around in the tty just fine, and when I go back to F7 it's still black. While in tty1, I can run top and I don't see any particular process that's halting xorg or anything. Anyway, after a minute and a half of this it finally plays the startup sound and shows the gui, and things work fine from then on. Now, I suppose I could just be expecting too much from an old machine with a slow hard drive, but the fact that it doesn't seem to be working that hard during this loading time makes me think it probably shouldn't be taking so long.
I also might mention that the windows key not opening the zorin menu is very disorienting and it's frustrating that it remains impossible to set up that bind... and also that when I try to open sound or network settings through the system tray it only has a 20% chance of ever actually opening them...
Aside from this, the OS works pretty well, the interface is great and it runs chrome just fine. I'm still wondering whether I made the right choice installing Zorin 8 on this though. I guess I probably should have used the Lite version or Zorin 6 for such an old machine, though it doesn't have much trouble running compiz, but I doubt the lite version would fix alsa or opengl. Might help with boot times though. I'm guessing any ubuntu-based distro would probably still have the same opengl problems since they all use the same radeon driver, but I don't think the opensource drivers from other distros are really any different so I doubt I'd have much luck even if I tried running Arch or Gentoo or something. Idk, I'd really like to make this version work, because it really is a nice UI, and even though I'm not the biggest fan of Ubuntu, it's got a lot of good features for a novice user like my dad who's just now switching from windows, but if he can't play Doom 3 without booting back into XP then I kinda feel like my job isn't done yet. Having surround sound in it would be pretty awesome too. And it would be nice if it didn't take almost as long as windows to boot properly.
First off, likely by no fault of zorin or ubuntu but rather the radeon drivers, OpenGL doesn't seem to run very well with the old X300 in the machine, despite the card being able to run windows DirectX just fine. It runs compiz decently, but when I tried to run my dad's favorite game, Doom 3 (which the computer ran just fine under windows xp) it only barely played at the lowest possible settings. This is the native version of Doom 3 too, the wine version only got like 5 fps. I've tried various video drivers-- the old card isn't supported by fglrx and the official legacy driver seems to be 64-bit only, leaving only the open-source radeon driver which is what I'm using now. I've also had compiz freeze when I tried using the desktop cube while a window was animating a close, I guess that could also be opengl-related-- plus sometimes the window previews from awn leave a corner on the screen which doesn't go away unless I bring up the desktop cube.
Second, also probably not the distro's fault; Alsa detects the ALC880, but does not output to the center/sub or the rear speaker jacks at all. I've tried lots of different settings, including changing the model to 3stack and 3stack-digout and various things like that, but I only ever get it to play through the front speakers, even when the sound configuration screen pretends to see 5.1 surround sound.
Third-- and I suspect other distros wouldn't do this-- when booting it shows the nice blue zorin logo screen for about 30 seconds and then shows a totally black screen for a minute and a half before finally showing the desktop. During this time, just about nothing is happening, and I can ctrl+alt+F1 and mess around in the tty just fine, and when I go back to F7 it's still black. While in tty1, I can run top and I don't see any particular process that's halting xorg or anything. Anyway, after a minute and a half of this it finally plays the startup sound and shows the gui, and things work fine from then on. Now, I suppose I could just be expecting too much from an old machine with a slow hard drive, but the fact that it doesn't seem to be working that hard during this loading time makes me think it probably shouldn't be taking so long.
I also might mention that the windows key not opening the zorin menu is very disorienting and it's frustrating that it remains impossible to set up that bind... and also that when I try to open sound or network settings through the system tray it only has a 20% chance of ever actually opening them...
Aside from this, the OS works pretty well, the interface is great and it runs chrome just fine. I'm still wondering whether I made the right choice installing Zorin 8 on this though. I guess I probably should have used the Lite version or Zorin 6 for such an old machine, though it doesn't have much trouble running compiz, but I doubt the lite version would fix alsa or opengl. Might help with boot times though. I'm guessing any ubuntu-based distro would probably still have the same opengl problems since they all use the same radeon driver, but I don't think the opensource drivers from other distros are really any different so I doubt I'd have much luck even if I tried running Arch or Gentoo or something. Idk, I'd really like to make this version work, because it really is a nice UI, and even though I'm not the biggest fan of Ubuntu, it's got a lot of good features for a novice user like my dad who's just now switching from windows, but if he can't play Doom 3 without booting back into XP then I kinda feel like my job isn't done yet. Having surround sound in it would be pretty awesome too. And it would be nice if it didn't take almost as long as windows to boot properly.
