Oolite Bulletins

I just installed Oolite 1.76.1 on Open SUSE 12.1 and I am experiencing very slow game play (4 FPS) and no sound.
The machine that this is installed on is a 10 year old (antique) IBM 831063U. Here are the specs. for this box:

• Serial# KANA034

Processor(don't laugh)

• Intel Pentium 4, 1.80GHz

Video Card (as old as the computer)

• nVidiia GeForce4 MX 440

The machine has 1.5 gig's of DDR RAM.
(This is the same computer that I mentioned in a previous post)

Prior to installing Open SUSE on this machine I was running Oolite on Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric and it ran perfectly. Of course I wasn't able to run any of the heavy OXP's with this video card, but I didn't have the slow game play that I am experiencing now. Also, when the game opens and asks if you want to load a commander Y/N, I have to press and hold my selection key for a couple of seconds before it even responds, and the same is true throughout all of the menu's.

As I said in the beginning, I am testing this to see if Oolite will run on the Open SUSE platform with this antique hardware.
If it isn't possible I can accept that but I have to try before I just give up.

Thank you in advance for any help you can offer.

While I can't provide much insight, I'll mention that I just did an openSUSE 12.1 install on my ancient machine (on a second HDD in a computer with similar specs as your machine), but removed it after a couple of days as I was having trouble doing much of anything with it, so I installed Ubuntu 12.04 which I upgraded to 12.10 by the upgrade tool last night. (Unity sucks even more than before since they dropped 2d - completely unusable - but no worries, Mate is installed ).

You may be more familiar with openSUSE than I am, most of my experience is with the Debian family, which I think I'm going to stick with for a while. I've gotten very familiar with apt and aptitude, too (the available software seems so much greater with the Debian family, although, I'm sure to get more options in YAST one has to add the appropriate repos.

Anyway, unless you know openSUSE really well or have plenty of free time to learn, why play around with a "foreign" distro? I can run Oolite on Mint 13 (Mate desktop) with almost every OXP I have installed on my new machine, even DH systems and famous planets (with the textures made a bit smaller), though I haven't tried Griff's on it.

Maybe something heavy is running in the background.

If you open (after starting Oolite) a terminal and type in the "top" command, you can see which processes are taking up CPU time and memory.
In the above example, you see "91.0%id" - this is how much of the time the CPU is idle (doing nothing) - this has to be high.

You also see that Oolite takes 31% of the CPU time and 11.1% of the memory.

Watch the top results for a while, it updates about every second or so and check if no other process eats your CPU or Memory.

Do you use the same window manager/desktop environment in SuSE as in Ubuntu? SuSE comes standard with KDE, which is "heavier" than Ubuntu's Unity. But you can change your window manager & desktop environment in both distros to whatever you want. If you use KDE4, you may want to disable Nepomuk etc... to gain performance.

Gimbal Locke wrote:

Maybe something heavy is running in the background.

If you open (after starting Oolite) a terminal and type in the "top" command, you can see which processes are taking up CPU time and memory.

Code: Select all

user@Computer:~$ top

top - 02:23:17 up 11 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.59, 0.29, 0.17
Tasks: 166 total,   3 running, 162 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
Cpu(s):  4.9%us,  1.4%sy,  0.0%ni, 91.0%id,  2.6%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   4030960k total,  1472552k used,  2558408k free,    97696k buffers
Swap:  3905532k total,        0k used,  3905532k free,   586872k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND            
 2042 user      20   0  675m 435m  12m R   31 11.1   0:11.04 oolite             
 1729 user       9 -11  161m 5268 3716 S   12  0.1   0:01.56 pulseaudio         
 1094 root      20   0 48032  13m 7576 S    6  0.4   0:35.96 Xorg                       
 1675 user      20   0  680m 187m  37m S    2  4.8   1:17.87 firefox            
 1739 user      20   0 21936 8276 6836 S    2  0.2   0:13.43 xfce4-systemloa    
 1867 user      20   0  132m  19m  13m S    2  0.5   0:07.85 plugin-containe    
 2121 user      20   0  2852 1160  872 R    2  0.0   0:00.01 top                
    1 root      20   0  3540 1968 1280 S    0  0.0   0:00.91 init               
    2 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd           
    3 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.03 ksoftirqd/0        

In the above example, you see "91.0%id" - this is how much of the time the CPU is idle (doing nothing) - this has to be high.

You also see that Oolite takes 31% of the CPU time and 11.1% of the memory.

Watch the top results for a while, it updates about every second or so and check if no other process eats your CPU or Memory.

Do you use the same window manager/desktop environment in SuSE as in Ubuntu? SuSE comes standard with KDE, which is "heavier" than Ubuntu's Unity. But you can change your window manager & desktop environment in both distros to whatever you want. If you use KDE4, you may want to disable Nepomuk etc... to gain performance.

Gimbal Locke, I believe you are onto something here. As you can see from the output of the "top" command, CPU usage is very high, in fact, it is showing that the CPU is 100% in use and if I am reading this correctly, the memory is getting hit pretty hard too.
I am including a couple of screen shots for you to look at so that you can see what I am seeing. Interestingly, it looks like Oolite is hitting the CPU for anywhere from 50% to over 90%. In the screen shot, I have just launched and am flying away from the space station and toward the planet. I haven't touched any keys on the keyboard and the CPU usage is still bouncing around all over the place. I assume that this is partially due to the other processes running in the background.
Based on what I am seeing here and my very limited knowledge of OpenSUSE in general, I have to conclude that the OS is just to heavy for equipment this old.
Your opinion about that is greatly appreciated?
Thanks again mate.

Edit: I just realized that I don't know how to, (or I forgot how to), add an image of the snapshot that I took, to this post.
If you could coach me a little here I would be happy to post again with those images. doh!

CommRLock78 wrote:

While I can't provide much insight, I'll mention that I just did an openSUSE 12.1 install on my ancient machine (on a second HDD in a computer with similar specs as your machine), but removed it after a couple of days as I was having trouble doing much of anything with it, so I installed Ubuntu 12.04 which I upgraded to 12.10 by the upgrade tool last night. (Unity sucks even more than before since they dropped 2d - completely unusable - but no worries, Mate is installed ).

You may be more familiar with openSUSE than I am, most of my experience is with the Debian family, which I think I'm going to stick with for a while. I've gotten very familiar with apt and aptitude, too (the available software seems so much greater with the Debian family, although, I'm sure to get more options in YAST one has to add the appropriate repos.

Anyway, unless you know openSUSE really well or have plenty of free time to learn, why play around with a "foreign" distro? I can run Oolite on Mint 13 (Mate desktop) with almost every OXP I have installed on my new machine, even DH systems and famous planets (with the textures made a bit smaller), though I haven't tried Griff's on it.

I completely agree with you that Unity sucks, it sucked before and (as you said) even more since they got rid of 2d. I have been reading all kinds of feedback on this topic and little to none of it is good.
And in response to openSUSE, no, I am not very familiar with it at all. In fact I installed it to try it out. I do like the security of RHL and I am pretty partial to having the choice to enter true root as opposed to sudo root but honestly, I haven't found anything that I can't do with sudo that I can with su. And sudo is a little more forgiving to be honest.
Like you, I too have become pretty comfortable with APT and APTITUDE.
The reason that I installed openSUSE was to 'broaden my horizons a little, just to have a bit of knowledge with a different distro. To be honest, I used to play around with FreeBSD years ago, back when everything...and I mean, EVERYTHING was done from the command line.
Even Internet access. It was a real education for me.
I agree with you that there seems to be a lot more software for the Debain distro's and I am sure the reason for that is because of the growing popularity of the distro and all the press that it is getting.
I'm probably looking a building another machine in the future and installing openSUSE on it just to learn how to use it, and continuing to use the Debian distro;s for my day to day stuff.

Thanks for the post my friend,
It is appreciated.

O'neal wrote:

I completely agree with you that Unity sucks, it sucked before and (as you said) even more since they got rid of 2d. I have been reading all kinds of feedback on this topic and little to none of it is good.
And in response to openSUSE, no, I am not very familiar with it at all. In fact I installed it to try it out. I do like the security of RHL and I am pretty partial to having the choice to enter true root as opposed to sudo root but honestly, I haven't found anything that I can't do with sudo that I can with su. And sudo is a little more forgiving to be honest.
Like you, I too have become pretty comfortable with APT and APTITUDE.
The reason that I installed openSUSE was to 'broaden my horizons a little, just to have a bit of knowledge with a different distro. To be honest, I used to play around with FreeBSD years ago, back when everything...and I mean, EVERYTHING was done from the command line.
Even Internet access. It was a real education for me.
I agree with you that there seems to be a lot more software for the Debain distro's and I am sure the reason for that is because of the growing popularity of the distro and all the press that it is getting.
I'm probably looking a building another machine in the future and installing openSUSE on it just to learn how to use it, and continuing to use the Debian distro;s for my day to day stuff.

Thanks for the post my friend,
It is appreciated.

No problem - I love a reason to post here and help out a fellow penguin (or at least try, at any rate ).

To broaden my horizons was my motivation for trying out openSUSE, too, but like I said, I was having trouble doing much of anything, and the middle of the school term probably isn't the best time to start learning a new distro, so I went back to the great "gateway" distro, Ubuntu (really, I'd just come in to an extra 30 GB hard drive from a friend and thought, why not dual boot my old dimension with Mint and something else). I don't know about you, but I haven't been able to get virtual box connected to the internet in a few months, so I haven't had the opportunity to distro play as I'd like.

When you get the opportunity to build that new machine, you should go with an AMD/ATI GFX card, they seem to be more kind to linux from what I understand - the proprietary driver installed on Mint 13 without so much as a hiccup for my Radeon HD5450.

Thargoid wrote:

I would also wonder a bit about the drivers involved...

A quick look shows that the MX440 supports natively only OpenGL1.2.

Since 2002 NVidia drivers are using software emulation to support newer functionality even on older boards which usually simply means 100% CPU load, sluggish and unresponsive systems and wrong reported support for applications. I guess it's pretty much the same under Linux.

Downgrading the driver may help as it gets rid of wrong reported OpenGL support - but I'm not a Linux user, so don't nail me here.

O'neal wrote:

Edit: I just realized that I don't know how to, (or I forgot how to), add an image of the snapshot that I took, to this post.
If you could coach me a little here I would be happy to post again with those images. doh!

You'll have to upload your screenshots to a public server (for example photobucket), then you can use the "img" tags to link to the photos in your post.

If you don't like Unity, but still want to use Ubuntu, have a look at Xubuntu (with XFCE) or Lubuntu (with LXDE).

Gimbal Locke wrote:

If you don't like Unity, but still want to use Ubuntu, have a look at Xubuntu (with XFCE) or Lubuntu (with LXDE).

Or install a better desktop upon vanilla Ubuntu - I installed MATE and have pretty well disabled all the fluff / unnecessary (gnome) things as well as hidden gnome apps (such as gedit) in the menu. Overall I'm pleased (it's not Mint), but I have a new Ubuntu with an old-school gnome look - no fallback session here .