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Gideros Player in Linux — Gideros Forum

Gideros Player in Linux

petecpetec Member
edited May 2012 in General questions
Just out of idle curiosity, I dug out an old laptop, installed Ubuntu 11.10 and Wine 1.4 and then installed Gideros Studio. All works well when using the Gideros Player on my laptop except for anything to do with physics. Then it runs really slowly (I tried the physics examples included with Gideros as well as my own stuff just in case it was my bad coding). When I tried the same things on the player on my phone, they were fine. Is that normal when running under Wine? It is an old laptop (Intel Celeron 1.7GHz, IGb ram) so I guess that might be the cause.

As I say, this was more idle curiosity than anything else, although I do quite fancy moving over to Linux eventually.

Comments

  • on old hardware is normal.
    i think the main bottleneck is the video card...
    on my laptop (dual core T8100 and geforce 9200 the player is a little slow, but on another laptop with T6100 and a geforce 8600T is very very fast! using ubuntu 12.04)
    .

    what video card do you have in your laptop? have you installed accelerated drivers ?
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  • petecpetec Member
    edited May 2012
    I thought it might be that reason. I don't know what video card I have off hand and haven't installed any special drivers. The laptop is an old Compaq c500. I'm not at all Linux savvy so it's a fun stumble around!
  • Compaq C500 should have an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 (shared)
    not very powerful... :(
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  • gorkemgorkem Maintainer
    If you have a generic driver, chances are OpenGL support is not enabled by default. You should first check what video card you have. Usually if you have a video card like Nvidia whose drivers are proprietary, then these drivers are not installed by default and you should (halfway-manually) install them. Try Googling, as different video drivers need different handling / installation methods
  • petecpetec Member
    Thanks - I'll see what I can find. I'm not feeling very in control of Linux at the moment!
  • gorkemgorkem Maintainer
    I believe it'll go smooth. Let us know which video card you have first and we'll try to help you.
  • petecpetec Member
    edited May 2012
    As @GregBUG said, HP's site shows the video adapter as Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 (shared)
  • gorkemgorkem Maintainer
    You can try instructions on this page:

    http://askubuntu.com/questions/70643/intel-gma-950-missing-driver-for-an-eee-pc-1008ha

    It basically shows how to configure GMA 950. First two commands may give erroneous results but rest will (hopefully) assure you to install proper drivers & configure.
  • petecpetec Member
    Thanks @gorkem. I just tried that and it's still as slow as before. I did have some errors at the third instruction:

    sudo apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-core libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libgl1-mesa-dri:i386 libgl1-mesa-glx:amd64 libgl1-mesa-dri:amd64

    where it reported something like done,done and then messages that it could not find amd64 parts.

    I also tried the suggestion here http://www.jacoblog.net/2011/10/29/ubuntu-11-10-intel-driver-problem/ (and did sudo update-grub after saving the change) but that also made no difference.

    It does seem from googling that this video set up causes problems!
  • MichalMichal Member
    Just out of idle curiosity, I dug out an old laptop, installed Ubuntu 11.10 and Wine 1.4 and then installed Gideros Studio. All works well when using the Gideros Player on my laptop except for anything to do with physics. Then it runs really slowly (I tried the physics examples included with Gideros as well as my own stuff just in case it was my bad coding). When I tried the same things on the player on my phone, they were fine. Is that normal when running under Wine? It is an old laptop (Intel Celeron 1.7GHz, IGb ram) so I guess that might be the cause.

    As I say, this was more idle curiosity than anything else, although I do quite fancy moving over to Linux eventually.
    First, check what card you have running "lspci" in terminal, and look for VGA (or "lspci|grep VGA").
    Then, check if you card supports opengl:
    http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-test-opengl-2d-3d-graphics-card/

    I would also check other examples or games (preferrably with lots of animations and not using physics), because I don't think box2d uses OpenGL directly (but might be wrong here), and if it is the slow card issue, other examples should be slow too.
  • petecpetec Member
    @Michal thanks. I tried the site you gave for testing the card and using glxinfo | grep rende got the output:

    direct rendering: Yes
    OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) 945GM x86/MMX/SSE2

    When I used glxinfo on its own, I got a long list of results. Under the headings 32 GLX Visuals and 48 GLXFBConfigs all the lines of info ended with (mostly) 'None' and occasionally 'Slow'. I have no idea what they mean but it doesn't look promising!

    I'll have a look for some other examples that I can test. Having searched quite a lot on the internet I have found lots of people having trouble with the performance of the same type of graphics card, although I don't have a problem with You Tube videos which some people do. None of the suggested solutions I have found so far have made any difference.

    I think I'll try and persuade my wife that she'd like this nice little linux laptop and steal her's to have a go on that...
  • MichalMichal Member
    @Michal thanks. I tried the site you gave for testing the card and using glxinfo | grep rende got the output:

    direct rendering: Yes
    OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) 945GM x86/MMX/SSE2
    So you do have opengl support. What is the CPU usage when you run your examples? Are the physics examples using 100% CPU? If so , then it's a CPU issue, not GPU. You can check CPU load by running "top" in a terminal, while running your examples.
  • petecpetec Member
    @Michal - I tried that and, using the collision detection example that comes with Gideros Studio, the CPU percentages peaked at around 56% Gideros Studio, 30% wineserver and 3% Gideros Player. The only other thing open at the time was Firefox with this forum which showed just over 1% when Gideros Studio reached maximum usage.
  • atilimatilim Maintainer
    edited May 2012
    @petec On some computers, Gideros Studio consumes too much CPU power while it's trying to connect to the player. And after connecting, CPU percentage should decrease to %1-%5 range.
  • petecpetec Member
    @atilim The percentages I've given were while the collision detection example was running, so the player was connected.
  • MichalMichal Member
    So it's not a CPU then... Do other OpenGL programs/games work OK? Here are some candidates to test: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OpenGL_programs
  • petecpetec Member
    Thanks @Michal. I may give that a go sometime but for now I think I'm giving up. I know so little about Linux that even understanding how to install some of those games is beyond my current knowledge (some of the instructions given mean nothing to me!). When I've got a bit more time, then I'll get back to it.

    The only reason I was looking to switch is that the editor in Gideros Studio is very 'sticky' on my usual laptop (AMD processor, 64bit Windows) and doesn't scroll easily nor allow me to select individual words all that easily - it's fine sometimes but very laggy at others. So I was looking to try an alternative. The editor is great under Linux but the player not so good on this particular laptop. It seems my hardware is a pain!

    Thanks to everyone for the help provided. I'll let you know if I manage to switch to Linux. One thing I do know is that it won't be on my wife's laptop... :(
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