So I made the switch from MS to linux. I went with Gentoo because you
can customize everything and thats cool. I got everything installed
but I'm having a few problems. Some of them are gentoo related and
some of them are more program specific. Number 2 is the real important
one.

1) I have KDE installed and I want the screen fonts to be antialiased.
I went into Control Center -> Appearence -> Fonts and turned
antialiasing on. Even though most of the screen fonts appear to
anti-aliased many of them do not. Why is this?

2) I've followed the instructions (www.linux1394.org) to the T to get
my external firewire hard drive working but to no avail. I have all
the necessary modules (ohci1394, raw1394, ieee1394 and sbp2). However
when I run the rescan-scsi-bus.sh script it can never find my hard
drive. The weird thing is that when I run gscanbus-0.7.1 it can find
my harddrive. It is formatted in NTFS but I don't think that matters.
In any case it never shows up in /dev/. I've looked in practically
every folder there but I can't find anything.

3) X is kind of slow. I have a crappy video card (ATI Rage Mobility
P/M) but all of the desktop graphics were quite speedy in windows. I
disabled all of the fancy effects in KDE but I think that either my
computer is too slow or I'm doing something really wrong. My video
card has 2D acceleration and 8mb of memory. Any suggestions?

4) I really want to be able to do video editing. Does anyone know of
any good video editors? I've seen a bunch of video processors
(encoders, decoders, effects etc) but no full video editing suite.


Thanks so much for helping me out.

On 2003-12-07, Michael <mes65@cornell.edu> wrote:
> So I made the switch from MS to linux. I went with Gentoo because you
> can customize everything and thats cool. I got everything installed
> but I'm having a few problems. Some of them are gentoo related and
> some of them are more program specific. Number 2 is the real important
> one.
>
> 1) I have KDE installed and I want the screen fonts to be antialiased.
> I went into Control Center -> Appearence -> Fonts and turned
> antialiasing on. Even though most of the screen fonts appear to
> anti-aliased many of them do not. Why is this?
>

If it is only certain apps, they may not understand anti-aliasing...


> 3) X is kind of slow. I have a crappy video card (ATI Rage Mobility
> P/M) but all of the desktop graphics were quite speedy in windows. I
> disabled all of the fancy effects in KDE but I think that either my
> computer is too slow or I'm doing something really wrong. My video
> card has 2D acceleration and 8mb of memory. Any suggestions?
>

The card may have 2d acceleration, but if the driver does not
then it will not happen. There is a media-video/ati-drivers
which may or may not help...



> 4) I really want to be able to do video editing. Does anyone know of
> any good video editors? I've seen a bunch of video processors
> (encoders, decoders, effects etc) but no full video editing suite.
>

I am trying media-video/cinelerra I also heard media-video/avidemux
is good, but I have not tried it yet. There was an article just
today talking about this:
http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5335

On Sun, 07 Dec 2003 15:07:30 -0800, Michael wrote:

> So I made the switch from MS to linux. I went with Gentoo because you
> can customize everything and thats cool. I got everything installed
> but I'm having a few problems. Some of them are gentoo related and
> some of them are more program specific. Number 2 is the real important
> one.
>
> 1) I have KDE installed and I want the screen fonts to be antialiased.
> I went into Control Center -> Appearence -> Fonts and turned
> antialiasing on. Even though most of the screen fonts appear to
> anti-aliased many of them do not. Why is this?

Check what font size limit to antialias is set in kde. Generally it's set
to not antialias anything below 8 pixels. Also you need to change the font
selected in control panel for all kde fonts. Check out the various fonts
that are available and find one that works better.

> 2) I've followed the instructions (www.linux1394.org) to the T to get
> my external firewire hard drive working but to no avail. I have all
> the necessary modules (ohci1394, raw1394, ieee1394 and sbp2). However
> when I run the rescan-scsi-bus.sh script it can never find my hard
> drive. The weird thing is that when I run gscanbus-0.7.1 it can find
> my harddrive. It is formatted in NTFS but I don't think that matters.
> In any case it never shows up in /dev/. I've looked in practically
> every folder there but I can't find anything.

You shouldn't see it in dev but add a mount point under /mnt/ [mkdir
/mnt/fire] and then edit fstab and add the new mount point with the
setting of auto for filesystem type. In order though to have it working
you need ntfs built into your kernel.

> 3) X is kind of slow. I have a crappy video card (ATI Rage Mobility
> P/M) but all of the desktop graphics were quite speedy in windows. I
> disabled all of the fancy effects in KDE but I think that either my
> computer is too slow or I'm doing something really wrong. My video
> card has 2D acceleration and 8mb of memory. Any suggestions?

Try using the generic vesa vga instead of the ATI one. Also are you
absolutely sure the card has 8megs dedicated VRAM or is it built into the
mainboard and using system ram for video? If it's one of the integrated
versions, then you are not going to get much better performance with it.

> 4) I really want to be able to do video editing. Does anyone know of
> any good video editors? I've seen a bunch of video processors
> (encoders, decoders, effects etc) but no full video editing suite.
>
>
> Thanks so much for helping me out.

> > 1) I have KDE installed and I want the screen fonts to be antialiased.
> > I went into Control Center -> Appearence -> Fonts and turned
> > antialiasing on. Even though most of the screen fonts appear to
> > anti-aliased many of them do not. Why is this?
>
> Check what font size limit to antialias is set in kde. Generally it's set
> to not antialias anything below 8 pixels. Also you need to change the font
> selected in control panel for all kde fonts. Check out the various fonts
> that are available and find one that works better.


There is no size limit for antialias. I think it has something to do with
different types of fonts. Can all fonts be antialised? For some reason
courier 14 bold is antialised but courier 14 is not.

Michael Sander
mes65@cornell.edu