Oolite Bulletins

Commander McLane wrote:

The lighting system should work regardless of shader settings. 'Shaders' and 'shadows' have nothing to do with each other, despite the word similarity.

Right on, I thought that might be the case, which is why I said "if that makes a difference" - I'm a little green .

As an update to my last post, there is one strange thing going on with Celestia. I noticed the stars are quite dark, and instead of being blinded out as I approach the sun, they become more visible and brighter.

CommRLock78 wrote:

I can't help but wonder, since STK crashes the same way, that there's something system-wide causing this problem (or, even worse, some sort of conflict with the hardware??). These are the only crashes I'm aware of yet on this system, and I've even checked some other applications which are otherwise fairly resource demanding (not necessarily graphics heavy - except for Celestia, but still fairly resource gobbling) which all seem to work just fine. Very weird .....

If it's crashing with no OXPs that does suggest some problem with hardware and/or OS and/or graphics drivers. The change you made to gpu-settings.plist certainly doesn't do any harm.

It might be worth trying a Linux nightly build..https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=6853

Unfortunately I'm no linux bod, so can't really help any more. One thing I did do was a search of the boards to see if anyone else had ever posted a logfile with the same identified renderer, and the answer is no. I am aware of a windows user with a 865G who suffered some odd crashes. OpenGL 1.3 is AFAIK right at the bottom end of what should be able to run Oolite.

Capt. Murphy wrote:

If it's crashing with no OXPs that does suggest some problem with hardware and/or OS and/or graphics drivers. The change you made to gpu-settings.plist certainly doesn't do any harm.

Would it be worthwhile to set every shader entry in the file to OFF?

Capt. Murphy wrote:

It might be worth trying a Linux nightly build..https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=6853

Unfortunately I'm no linux bod, so can't really help any more. One thing I did do was a search of the boards to see if anyone else had ever posted a logfile with the same identified renderer, and the answer is no. I am aware of a windows user with a 865G who suffered some odd crashes. OpenGL 1.3 is AFAIK right at the bottom end of what should be able to run Oolite.

Oddly, except for the typical choppiness that Windows has while running games (especially with an old machine like this one), I didn't have any crashes on Windows XP last December/January, when I discovered Oolite. In late February when I got the new computer I removed XP completely from the Dell and went Linux on both machines (though I still have Win 7 on the new machine for firmware upgrades as they come in the next few years, then beyond that, I'm unsure of Win 7's future on my computer).

Thanks for looking into that . I guess what I'm going to have to do is keep playing around - I did ultimately got my new machine's issues ironed out, so I'm sure eventually I'll get it working. And, at the end of the day, getting it to run on that computer is really more so that my wife can get on the new computer and play her games, while I can still play Oolite on the Dell - but I can find something else to do for the meantime .

@Whole board
Thank you guys for your help. I'll keep checking in periodically, and I'll of course keep you all up to speed of any success or info worth sharing.

CommRLock78 wrote:

Would it be worthwhile to set every shader entry in the file to OFF?

No. The shader settings stuff is a red herring.

I made a post about the Mint install on the Mint forums (http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=101824). The board moderator thinks that the graphic problems I was having with Ubiquity (as well as Cinnamon) might be because 3d acceleration is not enabled . I will look into just how to do that, but, might these be two issues be related?
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Update to above: Well, I think that idea was barking up the wrong tree, glxinfo | grep rendering tells me that 3d acceleration is enabled.... ....

General Update
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I found an interesting thread about the Dimension 4600 graphics and Mint:
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 66&start=0

Even after making the following BIOS changes, and I still get crashes.
Changed the AGP aperture to 8MB
Changed the max video memory to 256MB (or 512MB - I maxed out the option)

Thanks again fellas, for all of your help. I think the big lesson here is even though integrated graphics have come a long way, they still are not all that great (to put it very nicely ). It is my understanding, though, that one can still install a discreet video card on a machine with integrated graphics; I'm sure I can find one for that old thing that will make it behave more nicely. Anyway, that seems to me about the only fix I can think of at this point - but it is a little disappointing that I had the same version of Oolite running reasonably on that machine with Windows XP and half the memory. I wasn't using the generic monitor, which is why I titled this topic with "generic monitor" in it - but I'm not necessarily convinced that that is the problem. However, other than the operating system (which is a major difference, but only in the most positive of means (for example, on the new computer: Mint w/Cinnamon DE basic RAM usage=200MB while Windows 7 basic RAM=1000MB)) and an improvement in RAM, the monitor is the only thing that's different about the configuration.

It's not super-powerful by any means - and hell, I'm not sure it's even fully integrated into the operating system yet (lshw -c video says that the display is UNCLAIMED), but, I got a video card for the machine ($5 on ebay). It's an ATI Rage 128 Pro Ultra TF with (don't laugh) 16MB memory. After I had some horrific crashes that froze my machine to death, I removed -nosplash option via alacarte and voilà - Oolite is running! Now, it ain't quick by any means, even after I recently added 512MB of RAM, for a total of 1 GB on the machine now, but it's running!

Perhaps the lesson here is Linux+Intel Extreme Graphics 2 (and/or 865g chipset) do not play nice with each other. Since it's running with the ACME monitor (actually a "Micron"), I have a hunch that the monitor wasn't ever a problem.

Anyway, just thought I'd update you all on the topic - for those of you that can't stand unsolved puzzles, at any rate .