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Showing posts from February, 2010

Sluggish Firefox Browser in Linux

Discussions suggest that a lot of Firefox 's sluggishness on Linux (as compared to Windows) is due to Intel compiler profiling (maybe, but GCC offers profiling ), compiler cpu optimizations ( i386 vs. i686 -- not so much anymore; Mandriva compiles Firefox for i586 - see BONUS at the end) and Linux's use of pango , a library for laying out and rendering text with an emphasis on internationalization (likely a cause of slowness). Let's get rid of Pango support first. This is easily done by editing your .bashrc file and adding at the end   export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1   Resource your .bashrc with $ source .bashrc You could also put the line of export code in .bash_profile. Then just re-start Firefox to get the benefit. Short of recompiling Firefox ( which appears to be a daunting task ), we have found something that helps if you have RAM available. The trick is to keep the disk cache in /dev/shm , a POSIX-compliant temporary filesystem ( tmpfs ). Let's us

Kernel Mode Setting with the Intel Driver

My HP 1120NR  uses the Mobile 945GME Express Integrated Graphics Controller and my Acer Aspire 5315 uses the‎ Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller, both of which use the  0915 video driver. This means that I can use kernel modesetting . This is how: In /boot/grub/menu.lst , delete any vga= entries. Add i915.modeset=1 Reboot. Check to see if modesetting is enabled by looking for a value of modeset : 1 when you run the command get_module i915 I also added the file /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf that contains the following: options i915 gem_enable=1 options i915 modeset=1 options i915 fbpercrt=0 options i915 fastboot=1 The first line enables the GEM option. From here , "To [dis-]able GEM, just replace [1 with 0]. Users should try to disable GEM "when slow 3D performance is noticed and when the Xorg.log makes reference to problems enabling tiling due to it being rejected by the kernel" ." Mandriva disables GEM automatically for i8xx har

Adding Editors to GQView

GQView is an image browser that can easily be configured to use external applicatin to extend its functionality. In "Edit > Preferences > Editors" there are ten entries that can be used to identify and enter the command strings. GQView provides a few macros to assist you: Macro Description %f Inserts list of selected files, may occur only once. %p Command is executed once for each selected file, may occur multiple times. %v Display result of the command in an output window, must occur as the first two characters. %V Displays output window when multiple files are selected. Make Mirror Images By default, Editors 9 and 10 allow you to rotate jpeg images clockwise or counterclockwise using the jpegtran application, part of the jpeg tools . It would be nice to also flip the images to a mirror image. Add to, for example, Editor 8: Mirror Image %vif jpegtran -flip horizontal -copy all -outfile %p_tmp %p; then mv %p_tmp %p;else rm %p_tmp;fi A