debian on netbook questions.

[spud42]

I have an ACER AOA150 netbook with single core atom. i have dual boot win7 for work files and Debian Wheezy for fun and learning. i have Oolite installed on this and get a wide variance of framerates.

normal flying around i get around 30FPS, in the save screen i get 60 FPS but in the F8 screen i get 5 or 6 FPS. is this normal? how come a market screen is more graphic intense than flying to a station ?

next question is GRUB gives me the option of a 486 or 686 version t boot into. i have been booting into the 686 version . Is this correct for a 32 bit atom? or should i boot the 486? and whats the difference?

i installed this so i could get used to it for the Pandora successor the Pyra . It will be Debian with probable XFCE .

[Diziet Sma]

normal flying around i get around 30FPS, in the save screen i get 60 FPS but in the F8 screen i get 5 or 6 FPS. is this normal?

At the moment it is, yes..

how come a market screen is more graphic intense than flying to a station ?

From what I've read here and in the dev messages via Github, it comes down to inefficiencies in the text rendering code. I believe this is currently in the process of being sorted out.

next question is GRUB gives me the option of a 486 or 686 version t boot into. i have been booting into the 686 version . Is this correct for a 32 bit atom? or should i boot the 486? and whats the difference?

Your Netbook is the one with the 1.6 GHz Intel Single Core 32bit Atom N270 CPU, going by what I can find online? And I suspect that the 686 version you mention is actually 686-pae?

The short answer is that if one was actually incorrect for your machine, it wouldn't boot up. So if it works, you're good to go. PAE, or Physical Address Extension, (assuming the version being offered at boot is actually 686-pae), is a method of enabling 32bit CPUs to access more than 4GB of RAM.

Since you probably don't have more than 4GB installed anyway, it probably doesn't really matter which kernel version you boot.. though there are some rather odd internal differences between the Atom and a standard CPU, so you may (or may not) detect some performance differences between the two kernels. I'd suggest some experimentation may be in order.

[Smivs]

..how come a market screen is more graphic intense than flying to a station ?

As Dizzie mentions, this is a known issue, and was first discussed here.

[Cody]

how come a market screen is more graphic intense than flying to a station ?

Curiously, I think I've seen the same issue discussed on the FD forum.

[spud42]

thanks for the explanation guys. will try both kernals and see which gives better response if any....

EDIT: yes the 686 is a pae as dizzy suggested. i tried the 486 and seemed at first to have a few extra frames, but then it droped to around 20 during flight to a station and then Oolite just stoped and went to desktop. back to 686 pae... worked no crash. will stick with this....

in the other thread about 100% CPU usage cim asked to try the nightly build so i will see if i can get it and try tomorrow...