Off-topic: Further Wierdness, was: Re: Download Question

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 12 Jun 2015 11:04:49 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
>I would comment, for those in love with the proprietary NVidia driver
>for their gfx card, probably won't be able to use it because that
>driver gets much of its speed by masking off all IRQ's for as much as
>200 milliseconds at a time, I have watched it on a scope.  The nouveau 
>driver, which is getting better all the time, doesn't do that and I am 
>using it on this machine where it is plenty fast enough to display the 
>backplot of a simulated machine moving at 10x faster speeds than the 
>real thing can without breaking expensive tooling at $20-$80 a pop.

Maybe it's something the OP doesn't need, but FWIW, if the OP does use
the computer for the simulation software http://openscam.com/ and for
controlling a CNC machine and assumed for the simulation software the
proprietary driver and/or PAE should be needed, it's possible to switch
graphics drivers by a script at startup.

I once used the proprietary NVIDI driver for vanilla kernels and the
FLOSS driver for real-time audio patched kernels.

The OP could use a vanilla PAE kernel for the simulation software and a
non-PAE RTAI patched kernel for a CNC machine.

At startup, depending on the booted kernel, a script could link
xorg.conf to a file xorg.floss or xorg.proprietary to select the
wanted driver.