Friday, May 8, 2009

Konsole under Jaunty

As noted in several places, some applications feel somewhat sluggish in Ubuntu Jaunty compared with Intrepid if your system has an Intel graphics card.

There isn't a great solution for X in general yet - some options involving X.org tweaks and replacement X packages are discussed here

Applications which render a lot of text seem to be affected quite a bit. For Qt applications there is a simple workaround, in Konsole the workaround makes tab-switching much more snappy. Start Konsole with the raster graphics mode:

konsole -graphicssystem raster

This also works wonders on the Mendeley Desktop research management software which I work on.