Ubuntu Netbook Remix

sluggish home screen using decent CPU

Asked by henry Plant

The home screen is extremely sluggish while using an dual-core, 2.2 ghz AMD cpu & ATI HD 4670 graphics card. For instance, it takes about 30 seconds for the home screen to recognize that my cursor is hovering over an icon- also, when I switch between an app and the home screen, the home screen stays translucent for about 30 seconds before it fades back in. whats the deal?! I have way more horsepower under the hood than is typical netbook- there should be no slowdown.

the strange thing is that applications work fine with ZERO slowdown- its just the desktop itself. Im able to run firefox, the terminal, and other apps with zero problems- it just when I switch back to the homescreen that the slowdown occurs. I opened the system monitor and it seems as if one of the processor cores is fluctuating between 98% and 4% every half second. What could be causing this? is this an issue with my new(ish) ATI graphics card? please help

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Jonathon Hodges (jonblondie) said : 		#1

I saw a similar problem with my netbook until the graphics drivers were improved in Ubuntu 9.10. Are you running the proprietary ATI drivers or the open source Ubuntu ones?

Administration -> Hardware Drivers

Jon

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Jaime Villate (villate) said : 		#2

Hi,
I have exactly the same problem and I suspect it is not due to the graphic drivers but it is some GDM issue. I installed UNR 9.10 yesterday in a Toshiba NB100 and experienced the same sluggishness reported by Henry.

Switching into a virtual console (I used Alt+Ctrll+F4, because F1, F2 and F3 are used for something else) I realized that the system had a very low load and it was working fine. Restarting gdm would not solve the problem, but killing it (sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop) and starting a new X session with "startx" allowed me to work with the regular UNR desktop without any problem.

Jaime

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