Why do I have to spend days laboring on s**t that ought to just work?

[Batalov]

Originally Posted by chalsall

2. You don't get the "cool" GPU assisted UI special effects like fade and a 3D cube.

I see that as an upside!

In fact, I had boxes where I would "init 3" and enjoy half a gig of freed memory; but of course working entirely in a black text shell is a bit of a downside. (There's more than one shell available to you in such twisted text world, before someone argues about that. You switch between different ones with "Ctrl-Alt-F1", "F2", "F3", ... "F7". That's usually enough.)

[xilman]

Originally Posted by chalsall

FWIW, I personally have standardized on CentOS for all non-mobile installations.

Personally I very much like Gentoo. But, there again, I've been building Unix systems from source since BSD 4.0 in 1980 or so when I participated in a port. I forget the exact date...

Porting BSD was fun. The license conditions were such that the suppliers couldn't give support so what arrived was a couple of magtapes, three binders of documentation and a hand-written note saying "Good luck".

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by xilman

Personally I very much like Gentoo.

Not for the faint of heart...

If you want to get a job done, Gentoo is not the favored OS.

If you have infinite time on your hands, I agree Gentoo is pretty cool....

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by Batalov

I see that as an upside!

In fact, I had boxes where I would "init 3" and enjoy half a gig of freed memory; but of course working entirely in a black text shell is a bit of a downside. (There's more than one shell available to you in such twisted text world, before someone argues about that. You switch between different ones with "Ctrl-Alt-F1", "F2", "F3", ... "F7". That's usually enough.)

To use the modern vernacular: "well, duh!"

Why are you even in front of the machine. It's cold in the machine room. SSH into it.

Silly! ()

[paulunderwood]

This might help with nvidia and ubuntu:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Bi...erHowto/Nvidia

[xilman]

Originally Posted by chalsall

Not for the faint of heart...

If you want to get a job done, Gentoo is not the favored OS.

If you have infinite time on your hands, I agree Gentoo is pretty cool....

I find that the initial set-up is lengthy. Thereafter, it's a matter of a weekly

emerge --sync
emerge --pretend --newuse --deep world
# if required, emerge --newuse --deep world

and is really no more difiicult to keep up to date than most Linux varieties.

Paul

[kracker]

Have to agree with the OP... I've spent countless hours trying to get a damn thing working on Linux(mostly the GPU) while so I finally installed Windows 7, everything was so easier and stress-free(nothing against Linux at all mind you, just my experience). Or maybe I'm just a noob on computers.

[chappy]

I liken the situation to the difference between an automatic transmission and a manual transmission. The former is more expensive has higher maintenance costs but is far easier to use. The latter costs less to buy/run/use. Is ultimately more fun to use (or more useful/configurable however you want to define it) if you take the time to learn how to use it.

They both, ultimately do the same thing.

It depends on your level of interest. If you don't mind taking the time, or, enjoy taking the time I'm sure that Linux is a better product. For most applications I'm not willing to take the time. (Though I'll defend a manual transmission any day of the week :)

[kracker]

Perhaps. I free more free using Linux(because it is?) but there are some things that I need windows for....

Don't click this.

[Prime95]

New Ubuntu problem. This is a hyperthreaded i7-860. If I start mprime I get iteration times of about 0.39. After a while it changes to times of 0.79.

I've run htop and it shows 4 cores active. I've run sensors and it indicates temps are very reasonable - around 60.

Ideas?

I'm trying again after rebooting with hyperthreading turned off in the BIOS. I'll report the results soon.

Update: It looks like turning hyperthreading off "solves" the problem. Does anyone else see this kind of weirdness in Linux on a hyperthreaded machine.

[TheMawn]

If I had to guess, your program might be assigning four assignments to two physical cores.

I've seen four workers on a hyperthreaded quad core under windows 7, and the individual core usage jumps all about because the job is constantly being switched from one thread to another. Could it be that the program randomly moves the work around from core to core?

[EDIT] This whole post might even make sense at some point... Edits all over the place... I don't really know how operating systems and programs deal with each other with regards to how the work is distributed across cores. It might sound like I'm accusing your program here but it might also be an actual linux thing. My suggestion would have been turning off hyperthreading had you not mentioned doing just that. If you just left it off, I'm sure it wouldn't be the end of the world.