News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Computers. Parent comment

Re:Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Com... by anthk on Thursday May 06, 2021 @08:44AM (#27062358)
>I also found that I was able to play 480p Youtube videos in full-screen mode and listen to music on Pandora.

Holy shit, he/she is very uninformed. Pandora plays perfectly with some CLI player (I can't remember it's name), and for youtube damn mpv with youtube-dl (my config for my trash machine) will play any 720p video fast as hell.

~/.config/mpv/config:

    vo=gpu,drm
    sws-fast=yes
    sws-allow-zimg=no
    zimg-dither=no
    vd-lavc-skiploopfilter=all
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Com... by amiga-workbench on Thursday May 06, 2021 @09:03AM (#27062568)
Yup, I've got mpv playing back 720p youtube on a 1.8Ghz Pentium M machine with no trouble at all.

The real issue I'm having is that with all the old 2D graphics acceleration API's being deprecated in X11, you are stuck with Glamor to accelerate desktop compositing, and that only works if you have a later fixed function GPU, or a modern programmable GPU. If you're stuck with an old ATI FireGL like I am, X11 will vomit an error about the GPU not having enough instruction slots to do the job.

Its kind of baffling, the hardware is capable enough to run Half Life 2, but it can't composite a few windows? I'm almost tempted to go compile X11 myself and remove that particular check.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Com... by anthk on Thursday May 06, 2021 @11:36AM (#27064847)
Disable Glamor and enable EXA rendering. My 10-radeon.conf:

    Section "OutputClass"
       Identifier "Radeon"
 MatchDriver "radeon"
 Driver "radeon"
 Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
 Option "EXAVSync" "false"
 Option "SwapbuffersWait" "false"
    EndSection
My GPU: AMD RS690M [Radeon Xpress 1200/1250/1270]
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Com... by luke2m on Thursday May 06, 2021 @09:12AM (#27062682)
Not a CLI, but Pithos [0] works great. [0] https://pithos.github.io/
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Linux Has Largely Abandoned Still-Useful Near-Vintage Com... by anthk on Thursday May 06, 2021 @11:56AM (#27065163)
Now I remember: pianobar.
[ Parent | on HN ]