[Tecdragon]

I have a secondary Acer Aspire 3000 laptop with the following specs
Ubuntu 10.04
CPU: AMD Sempron 3000+
RAM: 512mb of memory
VID: SIS 661/741/760 PCI AGP or 662/761gx PCIE VGA display adapter

Sorry about the vid description but that is all SYSInfo will give me

The laptop performs decently outside of the XBMC environment, meaning it plays music\videos, youtube etc just fine but launch xbmc and it slows down to almost unusable.

The questions:
Is the vid card the killer here? will this laptop just simply not do this media center? Or does it just need more memory? or does it need to launch directly into xbmc and not run from inside ubuntu? is there a lighter weight version of this or a less graphically intense application or settings?

[jhsrennie]

I've seen this on a test build of Ubuntu and it was the video driver. When I updated the video driver XBMC ran normally. I think (I'm a linux novice) it's the OpenGL support as on Linux XBMC uses OpenGL for the display. If the driver doesn't accelerate OpenGL it makes XBMC hopelessly slow.

JR

[mkortstiege]

Yeah, no gl performance means no XBMC fun.

[Tecdragon]

Unfortunately, it appears that ubuntu has no drivers for the sis chipset and is using a generic driver that provides minimal performance. Granted it seems to work fine outside of xbmc playing movies etc.

However, I may have to switch to windows xp as the only driver I can find that may work for this chipset is for that os. No worries, this is just an extra box I had laying around was going to try to make it into something cool again.

I post back with windows results, which btw, would not be a knock against linux, ubuntu is performing very well on the box, it is simply an archaic hardware issue.

Also, I am just trying to push component video through a vga adapter at regular tv (old rear projection).