S3 Graphics Ltd. VT8375

[ATavares]

Hello everyone.

Trying to bring a few old machines back to life and this is what one of them looks like:

CPU - AMD Athlon™ XP 2000+
GC - S3 Graphics Ltd. VT8375 [ProSavage8 KM266/KL266]
RAM - 1Gb

I have a problem and a question.

The problem:

Everything that seems to need any sort of graphical capability drags almost to a halt. Talking about stuff as simple as draging a window across the screen. Kind of stuff you usually see in Windows when you install the OS but still didn't installed the GC driver.

Tried to look arround for a solution but I didn't found any for this GC. What I found is a lot of people having trouble with VIA GC's but some threads are left abondoned before a definite  solution is presented.

Even though I can manage myself pretty well arround a computer, I'm kinda new to Linux and this problem sems to be, at the moment, beyond what I know about the OS.

I red in another thread that the information below may be useful to help solve my problem:

System:    Host: afua-M825VXX Kernel: 3.13.0-24-generic i686 (32 bit, gcc: 4.8.2)
          Desktop: Xfce 4.11.8 (Gtk 2.24.23) dm: lightdm Distro: Ubuntu 14.04 trusty
Machine:  Mobo: ECS model: M825VXX version: 3.1 Bios: American Megatrends version: 07.00T date: 04/02/01
CPU:      Single core AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (-UP-) cache: 256 KB flags: (pae sse) bmips: 3333.44 clocked at 1666.724 MHz
Graphics:  Card: S3 Graphics VT8375 [ProSavage8 KM266/KL266] bus-ID: 01:00.0 chip-ID: 5333:8d04
          X.Org: 1.15.1 drivers: savage (unloaded: fbdev,vesa) Resolution: [email protected]
          GLX Renderer: Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 3.4, 128 bits) GLX Version: 2.1 Mesa 10.1.3 Direct Rendering: Yes
Audio:    Card: VIA VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller
          driver: snd_via82xx port: dc00 bus-ID: 00:11.5 chip-ID: 1106:3059
          Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture ver: k3.13.0-24-generic
Network:  Card: VIA VT6102 [Rhine-II] driver: via-rhine port: d800 bus-ID: 00:12.0 chip-ID: 1106:3065
          IF: eth0 state: down mac: 00:0d:87:cd:78:25
Drives:    HDD Total Size: 80.0GB (5.1% used)
          1: id: /dev/sda model: ST380011A size: 80.0GB serial: 3JV62Q07
Partition: ID: / size: 73G used: 3.9G (6%) fs: ext4 ID: swap-1 size: 1.04GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap
RAID:      System: supported: N/A
          No RAID devices detected - /proc/mdstat and md_mod kernel raid module present
          Unused Devices: none
Sensors:  None detected - is lm-sensors installed and configured?
Info:      Processes: 152 Uptime: 1:53 Memory: 521.5/970.3MB Runlevel: 2 Gcc sys: 4.8.4
          Client: Shell (bash 4.3.11 running in x-terminal-emul) inxi: 1.9.17

The question:
This machine will be available to a small group of people and it's main use will be accessing online content. So, another thing I'm wondering is how well it will be able to use stuff like Facebook or Youtube.

Any help is much apreciated.

AT

[gold_finger]

Plugged your graphics card into Linux Beginner Search Engine and saw that it does appear that your graphics card has issues on several Ubuntu-based distros.  Didn't find any good solutions other than one poster who said it worked fine on LXLE, so you may want to give that one a try.  (Another possible alternative would be AntiX.)

As far as youtube goes, you're going to have problems running flash videos on that machine because Adobe discontinued flash support for older CPUs like the one on your machine.  Two ways around that are either:

1. Install an older version of flash-plugin that will work on that CPU, but has greater risk of security vulnerabilities.
   
2. Set browser to use HTML5 video on Youtube instead of flash.  (Use search engine to find out how.  I don't know exact steps.)
   

Either way, streaming video performance is not going to be great on that hardware -- particularly if you try viewing videos in full screen mode.

[ATavares]

Hey man.

I really apreciate your answer on this. If it doesn't work I may as well try something else, instead of endless tweaking something I'm not comfortable with at the moment and that may never work. Pitty though... I really like LL.

I'll run AntiX and LXLE in a VM enviroment first to decide wich one I like the most  and then instal (even though I may end up with 'whatever works best out of the box').

Thanks a million dude.


Update:
Maybe this will be usefull to some other user with the same GC and the same problem so, if the Admins don't mind, I'll update this regarding the two distros that gold_finger suggested (thanks again for your input man) .

AntiX - Doesn't work. In fact, off the box, the graphics related issues are worse then with LL. Still can't do something as simple as dragg a window and it has A TON of color related problems in most menus.
Mind you, this has NOTHING to do with AntiX. In another computer, in a VM environment, it had none of these issues.

LXLE - (instaling this tonight)