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.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the hint, Robert :)

It's a shame that Qt4's raster engine is often faster than using X11 directly (rather than side-stepping it) - one of my fondest hopes is that Qt Software will make fredrikh an offer he can't refuse ;)

nixternal said...

You know, I have always liked you, until now! I LOVE YOU! I have been batteling with this issue now for weeks, it is much faster all around, thank you, thank you, thank you!

ilm said...

off topic: your software looks great! This is something I have been searching for a long time (everybody thought it was non existent).

So it can extract title, authors, etc.. automatically from a pdf ? Is it possible to incorporate this in strigi as a stream analyzer ?

Anonymous said...

Awesome! This also makes Kate a lot faster when working with long lines.

I wonder if there is a way to make this the default for certain applications.

lebha said...

I can confirm that adding "-graphicssystem raster" also cures Konsole under the nvidia xorg driver. Thanks for the tip!

Anonymous said...

I solved the "konsole slowness issue" (Archlinux: I noticed the problem when using yaourt) by limiting the scrollback to 1.000 lines (instead of setting it to "unlimited")

Lisak said...

Thank you million times for this advice. I was going crazy about the Konsole slow rendering. I spent like 4 hours playing with it, until I finally read your blog post :-)

peakoilscotland said...

I saw really much worthwhile info in this post!