If anyone knows of additional forum or non-forum items for the steps to adding, installing, setup, use and testing of video drivers for any particular card not covered here, please post in this thread, and I will drag that URL to this page. Also, any corrections of any information seen here please post so that this post can reflect correct information for users. And, of course, any other information need be posted as well, please add to this thread so all can benefit.
This thread is structured as follows:
- what are the components that come to play in a Puppy PC?
- what are the steps we must follow to get video "properly" set on a PUP desktiop?
BigPUP's posting, here, is an excellent explanation and eye opener for us. I summarize that, to me, it appears there are 2 times that PUPs address video and it is done from 2 COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES (components)..
The components are
- 1st, at boot time when PUPs need to put text on the screen so that we can visually see the booting process. This "driver", per se, attempts to use something considered to be a "standard" for Linux boots. There are, though, some parameters that can be entered to control text sizing, depending on your distro.
- 2nd, PUPs will either walk you thru or make educated guesses for you to get you to a Puppy desktop screen. Here, your PUP will do this in 1 of 2 ways that I am aware of (there may be others, though).
- Walking you thru, the PUP distro maker is stepping back and asking you to decide. So you must be estute enough to know how to use the xorgwizard tool so as to select the appropriate path to get a PUP desktop.
- In the educated guesses way, some distro owners help the user along with some preselection that is done to get to a PUP desktop. Here, at desktop startup, the user can change some things for his PUP system, 1 of which is his video and its driver.
Remember, ALL USERS has a resposibility for the performance and the behavior of your video card on your PC when using Puppy, by design.
Now, the fun begins (at least for me) on where to go to get the best video experience that one can from his video card. This again, is a user's responsibility. To do this, the user MUST determine his video card, he must manually choose, how to get that video card's driver (PET) onto his system by downloading and installing it. Next, he must choose the correct path for setting up the driver in the system as each individual driver is installed and setup DIFFERENTLY for the Puppy that the user is using..
Steps for video changes
To address the effort that the above paragraph touches on, this thread now turns its attention by pointing us to some proven steps for installing video drivers for your PC
- if you need to setup your nVidia card on your PUP see this procedure.
if you need to setup Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) on your PUP see this procedure.
===> (Expect other procedures to be posted here)
Even though I mentioned earlier that this discussion is confined to Puppy Linux, I think it my duty to indicate to ALL WINDOWS USERS that 99% of all Windows PCs were set up by the PC manufacturers before your PC hit the store shelves. This particular issue was addressed, by them, so that you, the user, would NOT have to address this item with your Windows PC.
In Puppy Linux, we do not have the luxury to have either inherited or purchased a PC with Puppy already "fixed" for us. So, we, the users, must do it, individually ourselves. That is why this thread is created. To help us understand "Why" we must take on the responsibility in this area, individually, ourselves..
in the future, should Linux gets so popular with the PC manufacturers that they pre-build Linux PCs for us, then, this video (audio too) need on our part will disappear.
Important to note:
Of all the PUPs in existence, today, there is only 2 PUPs that provide a tool that can be used to give a user a "baseline" (a baseline is a "starting point") for the video performance on their PC. The tool that comes with these 2 PUPs is GLXGEARS. The current 2 PUPs are; namely, WARY and Multi-WARY ("Quickset Wary-5.1.1q") by Barry-Shinobar. WARY uses the "walk you thru" boot approach while Multi-WARY uses the educated guesses approach to get users to the Puppy desktop. Using either of these 2 PUPs, you can immediately establish a baseline to compare this video starting performance with the changes you make as you attempt to inprove your video performance on your PC.
The way I use this is to run GLXGEARS as soon as I get to Puppy desktop. This give me a baseline. And everytime I make any changes to my system's video, I rerun GLXGEARS to see whether the change has a positive or a negative video impact on the running system. I save these GLXGEARS reports so that I can compare them by understanding what works and what is not good for the PC. All recommended changes may/may-not be helpful in your PC. An example is here.
This intends to be interactive. Hope this helps.