Since I got my Dell Vostro 1440, I felt that it wasn't quite as responsive as it should have been. Yesterday I spent a little time trying to figure out why that might be. (A little time -- like all morning.) I stumbled across what seemed like good instructions on troubleshooting Linux video. At the start of all the instructions was a warning to make sure the user was in the video group. If not, the user's desktop wouldn't be able to use the graphics hardware.
Well I checked my groups, and sure enough I wasn't in the video group. I added myself to the video group, and after logging out and in, and a day of use, I'm confident in saying that the desktop is much more responsive.
More Googling turned up a useful command: 'glxinfo | grep "direct rendering"'. It will tell you "yes" if you're going straight to the graphics hardware.
2 comments:
Good catch!
It's sure taking us a long time to get to where you don't need to be a "computer expert" to get a computer to work "properly".
Windows is no better than Linux in this regard. Macs may have a slight edge, but with significant dollar and freedom costs.
Absolutely. I have no idea how my account ended up not being in the video group. I think the nature of the device is that it will always be plagued with mysterious problems, and those of us who can fix them will be condemned to forever waste hours of our lives fiddling with our devices. :-)
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