arvidb wrote: PCW: No built-in graphics unfortunately. I do have another graphics card (that uses the amdgpu instead of the radeon driver) that I could use temporarily for testing though, if it turns out to be necessary.
BeagleBrainz: Thanks for trying to help.
* As I said, and as you can see from
Intel's E8400 page
, this is a 2-core CPU without hyperthreading.
* As I wrote, I'm using the radeon driver already (i.e. the default, in-kernel driver). No 3rd party drivers installed.
* As you can see from my previous message, I'm already running xfce.
* I'm actually already using a PS/2 keyboard on this computer, but I have no PS/2 mouse to try unfortunately. Also nothing wireless.
Do you have any specific reasons to believe another distribution (Mint) would help, despite running the same kernel, drivers and window manager on the same hardware? Redoing the install is a large undertaking since I'm using EtherCAT - I have to build everything from source. (It's great that you're eager to help, but it mostly feels like you're sending me on wild-goose chases by not taking time to understand the circumstances...)
Ok usually when users say they are using this or that driver they have installed a third party driver, that is how I took your statement.
The kernel I supply is plain vanilla, the only patch I used is the real time patch, by all reports latency seems pretty good.. After quickly running Buster with XFCE & Mint 19.2 with XFCE I found Mint to be snappier, which kind of surprised me.
I have a package that will pull in everything you need to rebuild Linuxcnc, no having to chase the dependencies for building Linuxcnc.
But in saying all that you are trying to use a 12 yro CPU, which in it's day it may have been a good choice, but 12 years later there are better choices. All the time you spending faffing around to get this setup working maybe better spent throwing a few extra beer tokens at a better system. Or you may or may not, depending on your MB, be able to upgrade to a Quad core. Isolate 2 cores and you should see an improvement. The Q9550 runs at a slight lower clock rate 2.83 vs 3.0Ghz but the L2 cache is greater 12MB vs 6MB.
Another thing you can do is look into what is running in the background at see what you can turn off.
At the end of the day is sounds like you are spending at bit of cash of your system, why not bite the bullet and get a computer that will run without having to spending a lot of time & hassle to reduce latency ?
I myself tried a few different options with some gear I had lying around and ended up just going with a new mb.
If you really want to test out Mint & XFCE I can upload one of my Live ISO's to my server and you can give that a spin, just dd it to a USB drive.The one there I have ATM is MATE, which really wont be a lot of good to you.
