Hardware accelerated window manager

crunchbanghardwareopenboxwindow-manager

i got a hand me down lenovo thinkpad and i was pleased that it was still comparatively fast as it was running windows 7 very smoothly…

but since i switched to CrunchBang (i'd like to think i'm always squeezing everything from any gadget i have), i've seen less smooth UI rendering. as for the video playback, it isn't as smooth as before and for it, the CPU usage can take up to 60%.

now, i should've looked at the CPU usage when it was running windows 7 for video playback and UI rendering for comparison, but i didn't (i won't reinstall windows 7 just for that). so i can't say for sure that it's using more CPU time. but i think i really think there's a noticeable difference.

CrunchBang uses OpenBox, which doesn't seem to use hardware acceleration from the GPU… but is there any way that i can simply add a package so that the window manager would use hardware acceleration? say, like, the Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI)?

as for the video playback, perhaps i can use the Gnash flashplayer and VLC, i just hope that VA API (which on Linux, sits on top of DRI) supports my GPU.

but my main concern for now is finding an accelerated window manager.

Best Answer

You can use a stand alone compositor such as xcompmgr, compton, cairo-compmgr, or unagi.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Unity: Stop Dock Repopulation at Restart

This page suggests the libdconf0 package may be corrupt, and can be fixed by running this command in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall libdconf0

This bug report suggests to me that an update might even fix the problem.

There's some additional information here on that particular issue: https://askubuntu.com/questions/49766/unity-launcher-does-not-remember-favorites

If the above doesn't help, this person (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1842493#post11429491) suggests deleting the unity config folder may fix the problem. They didn't specify which folder needed to be removed, but if it's a matter of a corrupt Unity configuration, the solutions here might help:

If there is a .unity or .compiz folder in your home folder, removing those (after backing them up) may work as a last resort, although that could mess up your entire gnome/unity/compiz configuration. It might be best to back up your entire home folder first in that case.

Debian – How to test hardware components to find out which one is bad

If your hardware is from a big vendor, say HP, Dell and so, they might have specific tools for what you're looking. I use to work with HP and they already have tools for reporting bad hardware.

If that's not the case, then it'll be trickier (based on my experience), you already started well testing memory as it uses to be a usual failing point.

Now if you doubt from you CPUs, you could expose them to an intensive job like compiling a kernel or any other big source like libreoffice, xorg, etc...you can use CPU affinity if you've got several CPUs.

Also, the error message is suggesting you to run "mcelog --ascii", you could do it and try to understand the messages, please read both links below I hope they'll help you with your HW problem:

http://mcelog.org/faq.html#5

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/articles/hardware-stability-p1.xml

Related Question

What display manager/window manager can support multiple monitors with different dpi