From what you’ve said I’m thinking that this graphics problem that you
started this thread about was not present when you bought the machine.
Is that correct? If so, then have you considered or tried returning your
machine to the state it was in when you bought it? (I assume HP provide
you with some way of doing this. If not, contact them and request that
they do so.)
PauliusC;2158053 Wrote:[color=blue]
I also tried watching movies in my laptop, but the video doesn’t always
run smoothly and I’m not sure if the problem is with GPU, software
(totem), or even CPU. I have the feeling that my laptop should perform
better.
[/color]
Video playback can require quite a lot of processing power, especially
if it’s HD video. There’s two ways of decoding video, in software or in
hardware. With the software method it’s your CPU that does all the work,
so you need to have a CPU that is sufficiently powerful to decode the
video. With the hardware method it’s your graphics card that’s doing the
work and you need to have a graphics card that’s capable of decoding the
video plus graphics drivers and a media player (e.g. totem) that is
capable of utilising video decoding capabilities of the graphics card.
I can play H264/AAC encoded 720p video in software on my machine Intel
Core 2 Quad machine, it uses about ~50% of one core. I have a small
touchscreen device that has an single core Intel Atom Z series CPU that
runs at about 1.2Ghz. That CPU is obviously nowhere near powerful enough
for playing H264/AAC encoded 720p, but the Intel graphics chip in the
device can decode it. So with the right graphics driver and media player
I can get that device to play a H264/AAC encoded 720p video. I have an
Asus EeePC with a single core Atom processor. It’s a few years old and
the graphics chip in it can’t do H264 decoding, so that machine is
incapable of playing H264/AAC encoded 720p video in a manner which is
watchable.
Support for hardware video decoding with Linux is still quite patchy
and inconsistent. Right now your best bet is to have a CPU powerful
enough to decode whatever you’re trying to watch.
PauliusC;2158053 Wrote:[color=blue]
In addition, I’d like to ask about these third party repositories.
Basically, what are the disadvantages of being not supported by SUSE?
Because, the ones which are supported, are also heavily outdated, take
firefox for instance. So is it really worth to have everything supported
by SUSE?[/color]
My understanding is that your machine shipped in a state where it’s not
supported by Novell/SUSE because it ships with a version of SLED that
has things added and possibly altered by HP.
SLED currently has Firefox 3.6.24. That was released by Mozilla on 8th
November, a little over 3 weeks ago. Firefox 3.6 is an old branch, but
it is still being supported. I expect that when Mozilla stop supporting
Firefox 3.6.x then Firefox then we’ll see the very latest version of
Firefox appear in SLED along with rapidly incrementing major version
number madness. I refer you to my comments on Firefox earlier in the
thread on how you can get the latest Firefox now.
SLED does not contain the very latest versions of packages. That’s sort
of the point. It aims more for stability than ‘look new shiny!’. The
only things I can think of in SLED 11 SP 1 that I would class as being
‘heavily outdated’ t would be TexLive and ntfs-3g. ntfs-3g is being
updated in SLED 11 SP2 (Which I’d like to think is a result at least in
part of my submiting an enhancement request for it.)
Whether support is worth it is up to you. The way I see it is if you
don’t care about having support from SUSE then there is no point in
using SLED. I think the clue to the circumstances under which you would
use SLED are in it’s name. SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. I manage
machines that are used by other people. I need a version of Linux with a
life cycle that doesn’t force me to upgrade every 12 months to a version
which has completely different versions of everything. I like to be able
to get support from Novell/SUSE when I encounter problems that I cannot
solve myself. There have been times I have found a bug, raised a Service
Request with Novell and they have subsequently provided a fixed version
of the relevant package. Sure you can open bugs against
openSUSE/Ubuntu/whatever, but if you’re paying someone for support they
actually have an obligation to fix the issue, and sooner rather than
later, or at least help you to work around it.
Personally I like SLED for the environment which in which I use it but
I wouldn’t use it on my own machine at home. I use openSUSE on that. I
do not care about paid support for a machine which only I use and
openSUSE has newer versions of GNOME, Firefox, etc which are interesting
to see.
If you want the latest version of everything and don’t care about being
able to get support from someone that is obligated to help you because
you’re paying them, then don’t use SLED. Use openSUSE. Or Ubuntu. Or
Fedora. If you want to be on the bleeding edge, check out Gentoo. 
–
mikewillis
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View this thread: http://forums.novell.com/showthread.php?t=448400
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