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On 11/17/2012 09:36 AM, Jeff Seager
wrote:
Rafe, I suppose I have drunk the Ubuntu Kool-Aid, but despite the problems I've had with 12.04 generally (not specific to XyWrite, mostly Unity/Compiz) I'm sticking with Ubuntu & Unity. For one thing, I just installed 12.10 on another partition, and it is working quite well. Plus I cannot say for sure that the problems I had with 12.04 didn't stem from a LOT of cruft left over from as far back as 10.4 and erm maybe even 8something -- and though when I installed 12.10, it took half a day to go through the list of all my old packages to strip down to the bare minimum, it was worth it. I don't think Paul Lagasse has had any problems using fullscreen XyWrite under Mint, either. I would never rule out going down a fork and saying sayonara to Shuttleworth who certainly at times seems a nutjob, but in the end, I am such a big fan of the lenses and HUD, things like the Amazon fiasco don't really bother me. I'm probably going to be in the market for a tablet in the next few months & the idea of putting Ubuntu on one is actually kind of exciting to me. In the interests of comparing notes, here are my experiences with dosemu/Xy and an NVidia GEForce 8400 under Ubuntu: A) Nouveau The Nouveau driver running Unity looks okay on my monitor -- not great, but perfectly acceptable. I ran it under this Quantal Quetzal (12.10) install for a couple of days, and basically thought it was sound until some things involving the lenses started to corrupt the screen. Moreover, under Nouveau, fullscreen dosemu is a big problem: 1) under xdosemu, going fullscreen shoots the entire session dead in the water -- the screen goes completely blank, and nothing is accessible in any way -- not by toggling out of f.s, nor exiting Ubuntu to a command prompt, nada. hard reboot. 2) however with plain old dosemu, even though the screen becomes unusable toggled fullscreen, it *is* possible to recover by toggling Ctrl+Alt+F back to the desktop. Particularly since after a few years of C-A-F'ing between Xy and the Ubuntu desktop the gesture is hard to get rid of, some unpleasant surprises have er convinced me launch plain dosemu instead of xdosemu. B) NVidia The only NVidia driver that has really worked f.s. for me is pretty old, 173 (they are up to about 310 now). Very handsome, fonts nicely customizable. Occasionally if I try to get into fullscreen I'd get a white screen instead -- but toggling back and forth fixed the problem. I have a Precise Pangolin (12.04) installation which was my day-to-day until I got fed up with Compiz weirdness -- that's the one I have been running with the 173 NVidia driver. When I have tried newer NVidia drivers, dosemu results have been terrible -- sometimes I get giant letters in an unusable Xy screen; and though I am able to toggle back to the Unity desktop, it usually is now displaying in something like 800x600 resolution instead of the 1920x1080. Installing the 173 driver is problematic under Quantal. I just now installed the 304 driver (they are up to 310, so theoretically this should be a ways back from the bleeding edge) and Unity looks altogether much nicer than with the Nouveau driver, and "fauxscreen Xy" is slightly crisper & brighter and seems more responsive, as does the system altogether. Hopefully this will be workable for the long haul. Rafe |