topic title: MX 14 recent install - short feedback
Posts: 96
melodie
Joined: 15 Feb 2008
#1
Hello,

Really amazing! The distro got alive a laptop Fujitsu Siemens Amilo-El N243S9 (also having for"name" EL 6800). This one has now 1 GB RAM, which was not too much a problem with another distro, (Bento, Ubuntu Openbox Remix), but the CPU was full use most of the time, and antiX MX on this part makes a huge difference!

It is now possible to view a video, from a file or from a DVD, it's perfectly smooth. I found a bug when I wanted to install smplayer: it does not start and complains about some missing lib, however that might be a bug upstream in Debian stable? So I left it alone and used VLC only.

The chipset is SIS, and so the display is not so good, especially the fonts really ugly, no possibility to get them smooth as is.

Here is when a trick I had used in the paste, on a Debian install comes in: using a set of packages meant to improve the fonts anti-aliasing. This trick had been taught to me by some people at Linux Mint, it was about using libcairo packages from Ubuntu because they had been patched. But now, these patched packages are available in Debian : just not in Stable! Here is the list, taken from Debian testing:

Code: Select all

fontconfig-config_2.11.0-6.3_all.deb 
libcairo2_1.14.0-2.1_i386.deb      
libfontconfig1_2.11.0-6.3_i386.deb 
libpixman-1-0_0.32.6-3_i386.deb
(of course, my list relates to the MX 14 version I used, I mean packages for i386).

I installed them four, and the difference is huge, now the fonts look normal! __{{emoticon}}__

Maybe a new improved future MX 14 version could use them?

Best regards,
Mélodie
Posts: 452
Jerry
Joined: 12 Sep 2007

16 Feb 2015, 23:46 #2

Those 4 are installed by default in MX-14.3--at least I don't think I installed anything like that--though not sure about earlier versions.
Posts: 96
melodie
Joined: 15 Feb 2008
#3
Jerry wrote:Those 4 are installed by default in MX-14.3--at least I don't think I installed anything like that--though not sure about earlier versions.
Then I bet I should check what I downloaded, download the latest, and compare.
Thank you. __{{emoticon}}__
Posts: 96
melodie
Joined: 15 Feb 2008
#4
Hi,

The versions are not the same. The newer version are patched, the versions of the above packages still in wheezy are not patched (at least one of them is, and the other ones are the depends, I guess libairo is the one which had one or more patches). Please compare in the following screenshot:

Image

I started antiX MX 14.3 in Virtualbox, and placed it besides the former post I did here.
In Virtualbox the fonts don't look bad, but in some machines with a very poor graphic chipset, such as for some old Intel cards, some Sis cards, it's very ugly.

I may have used some of the tips reported in this post, too:

========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://forum.linuxvillage.org/index.php/topic,529.msg3365.html#msg3365"
linktext was:"http://forum.linuxvillage.org/index.php ... ml#msg3365"
====================================


especially the one for the ~/.Xresources file, and perhaps the ~/.fonts.conf too.

Thanks to antiX and Mepis communities for the wonderful work. I enjoy this edition a lot!