What kind of graphics card?

[Eric Weir]

On 6/1/2008 Brian Pitts wrote:

>  How much memory do you have now and how much did you temporarily try?
>  You said you are using your motherboards integrated graphics now,
>  right? Do you know what driver it uses and how much of your system's
>  RAM it borrows?

I have 512 Mb. Tried 2 Gb. I have very little information on the mother 
board. I know the name -- Amptron 925 ATX. It's old -- my machine was 
made in 2002. I don't have the manual. I don't know how to check 
otherwise on the answers to the questions you ask. Talking with the shop 
that made it yesterday I learned that I bought the cheapest system they 
made. The motherboard was bottom of the line then.

That said, there have been further developments that may throw some 
light on what's going on, or may just muddy the waters further. 
Yesterday, on the first two attempts, my system failed to boot. The 
bottom line of the message I got, which I wrote down, was, "No space 
left on device." On the third try, it did boot. As previously, 
everything is glacially slow.

Today the boot process stopped while underway. The the characters on the 
screen was a statement to the effect that if I did a "control-d" boot 
would resume. I did control-d and the system finished booting. I ran the 
partition editor. It showed that almost all the partition on which the 
os is installed was used up: 7.5 Gb total, 3.5 Mb available. I just ran 
it a second time. Now it's showing 2.4 Gb available. In either case, why 
would Xubuntu be taking up that much diskspace? I haven't installed 
much/any extra software.

I have been trying to download the live CD for LinuxMint, but the system 
won't allow it. Says there's not enough memory to save in /temp. [I 
don't want to save. I want to write to a CD.]

Unrelated, but of concern to me, a second hard drive, which appears as 
mounted in the fstab file, does not show up on the partition editor. And 
I can't read it with my file manager.

It's beginning to appear that my hardware is all screwed up. I am at a 
turning point. My intention was to see if I could get a decent 
installation of Linux running on this ancient system. If I could. If I 
could demonstrate to myself that I can get a system set up, that I don't 
continually have to be tinkering with, I'd go out and by a new machine 
and put Linux on it. Otherwise, I'd go out and get me an iMac.

I am torn. The open-source idea and community are extremely appealing. 
I've convinced myself, through my own experience and what I've seen of 
others' systems, that the Linux route is definitely appealing.But I'm 
tired of fiddling. I don't want to have to be continually doing this.I 
want to use the system, not continually be working on it, especially 
since my experience and understanding are limited.

If I thought I'd have more success with a new machine -- even really 
good ones are not that expensive anymore -- I'd go out and buy one 
today. Given the problems I've had with Linux on this machine, I'm not 
confident that that would be the case.

Forgive what I know must be coming across as an ignoramus' rant. Any 
wisdom would be appreciated nevertheless.

>  My preferences are Intel > ATI (now owned by AMD) > Nvidia.
>
>  Compare ATI/AMD's open source strategy [0] to nvidia's [1].
>
>  [0] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=826 [1]
>  http://www.opentheblob.com/nvidia/

I've skimmed them enough to have a sense of what you're talking about. 
I've printed them out and will read them more carefully. I was under the 
impression that nvidia was more accommodating of Linux/open-source. Now 
I understand that that was with proprietary drivers that actually had 
limited capabilities.

I appreciate your trying to help when I can't be of much help in helping 
you be of help.

Sincerely,
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric Weir
Decatur, GA  USA
eeweir at bellsouth.net