Do we need Win95/98/Me support?

[Kiith-Sa]

> Dunno, Driver manager (or something like that) showed me an 
> empty list saying I don't have proprietary drivers installed. 
> Don't know how to find prepackaged drivers. Missed it in both 
> Mint and Ubuntu.
>
> Well, the complicated thing is that my notebook is new and it 
> has latest hardware: support for GeForce GT 520MX was added to 
> driver 285, but nvidia-current is 280. I don't know what this 
> "support" means; if vdpau will work with prepackaged driver, 
> that's great.

VDPAU doesn't work with the OSS drivers at the moment - you
need the binary driver for that.
It does sound like Ubuntu simply doesn't have the newest driver 
packaged yet - you can either wait for 12.04 - or -

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates
sudo apt-get install nvidia-graphics-drivers

should install unofficially packaged driver 290 found here:

https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/+archive/x-updates?field.series_filter=natty

(WARNING: didn't test it)


> Wikipedia mentions that Ubuntu has an issue with high power 
> consumption. I'm not sure whether it's my problem, but they try 
> to address it in Ubuntu 12 using very nifty tricks like putting 
> USB controllers to low power mode and hunting down software 
> with frequent wakeups and filing bugs against them. They don't 
> consider GUI system as a culprit at all.

The main power issue is the ASPM bug in the Linux kernel, fix for 
which should be backported to kernel in Ubuntu 12.04 (AFAIK).
I do have about 7 hours battery (coding) on my notebook,
which is more than people have on Win7
(university notebook - paid by the EU) - but that's KDE - with 
social desktop - and desktop effects - disabled.

> I don't have performance issues, I have high CPU load in idle 
> mode. I'm currently on win7 and the cooler seems to be off, in 
> Ubuntu and Mint the cooler worked at high speed and quite warm 
> air was coming from the radiator.

Weird. Doesn't happen to me on any distro.

That said, did you look at the system monitor?
Notice which process is using up the CPU - if it's something in 
Unity,
then KDE/XFCE/LXDE/whatever can fix your problem. Unity IS a 
resource hog, but it shouldn't cause a permanent load on the
CPU.

There is a possible cause, but that would be GPU, not CPU load:
NVidia stated that they don't intend to support Optimus on Linux.
What's worse, if you have an Optimus GPU, it runs on 100% all the 
time even though you're not using it.

That said, there are third party programs that provide Optimus 
support, Bumblebee and Ironhide. Both are alpha at the moment, 
though.
Work on my notebook (which has Optimus) - but I don't use graphics
too much, so I just used Ironhide to disable the NVidia GPU and
only enable it when playing games, running emulators or modelling 
(Blender).
That saves a LOT of battery life. 3 hr when GeForce is running 
constantly
vs 7hr when it's not.


> The wubi option is quite amasing, I hesitate to go for 
> full-fledged dual-boot installation.

Wubi slows the system down quite drastically.
(or at least did a few years ago, didn't test it recently)