Really Old Laptop, new life with MX

[Lorn]

All of the above is related to the ATI Radeon X1200/1250 (RS690) graphics card. Unfortunately, your laptop (like mine) is the "lucky" owner of this video card. I have read on many Linux forums that this particular chipset does not work correctly with drivers. You are still relatively lucky - you have a lot of RAM, 4 GB is not 1 or even 2 GB. Often, such a video card uses shared memory, and it can be allocated in the BIOS. The more memory you have, the better. I have to limit the video needs and use only 32 MB of 2 GB of RAM.

[Lorn]

I think that you should try MX's sister OS, Antix with a laptop of that age.

Antix, which is aimed at ancient computers like yours, can be found here:

https://antixlinux.com/

My reasoning is that the two most likely reasons for that flicker at boot are that the modern vesa video driver (that's loaded at boot) doesn't quite fit with your video card or that the screen refresh rate is incorrect. The reason that it works properly after boot is that the proper drivers are loaded by MX.

I confirm that antiX (23) does an excellent job, moreover, according to glmark2 tests, it is almost twice as fast in the graphics subsystem (64 units on antiX versus 35 on MX), all other things being equal. At the same time, comparative testing on the processor, memory and mathematical problems shows an excess of MX performance over antiX, by about 1.5 times. The only thing that bothers me a little about antiX is the need to develop the habit of constantly manually editing menu configs, or even forget that this Linux has a GUI and run anything exclusively from the terminal. In principle, I have several Linux systems without a GUI, but the tasks presented to them are typically not GUI-based. It's a shame that because of the only black sheep (video card), you can't fully use the beautiful and productive MX.

[Eadwine Rose]

You do realize that this topic is over a year old, right? No need to dig up old topics to respond to them.

[Lorn]

You do realize that this topic is over a year old, right? No need to dig up old topics to respond to them.

Has it occurred to you that not all people can use MX on the latest hardware?

[Eadwine Rose]

Old hardware is fine, but the policy on this forum is you do not dig up old topics, and start your own new topic as no two systems are the same.

[razor2021]

If you did not know this yet, you can change your older HDD (which is probably a mechanical HDD) and swap it for a SSD instead. Then you will see a much faster improvement too. If the laptop dies, you can re-purpose that SSD anyways. But try it with a SSD and install MX Linux on that one too. You'll find that you can use that laptop for even longer.

[Eadwine Rose]

Guys, this is someone else's topic, please start your own with QSI to avoid confusion. Topic locked.