Jaunty Jackalope stealing my CPU!
Being a dutiful ubuntu upgrader-to-latest-version type of person, I was sorely disappointed with Jaunty Jackalope. Why? Because my CPU was running at about 15% constantly with no applications running! and sometimes as much as 30% just moving a couple of windows around. On a 2.5Ghz Quad core machine, this is not acceptable. Internet research sugested that this was because Jaunty included the latest Xorg xserver and that this didn’t play well with older graphics cards. As I don’t have a particular new graphics card (an ATI 9200SE which I bought several years ago to give my older Windows PC more displays) I thought this was likely to be to blame.
I was also having problems with Compiz-fuision causing something (most likely Xorg) to crash and leaving me with a blank unresponding screen. Consequently I tried many different combinations of drivers and settings, while shying away from the ultimate “Roll back the Xorg version”, or trying to roll back to Intrepid Ibis.
However, I think the problem is not inherently with Xorg. Last week, after a routine update of various xorg patches, I couldn’t start the xserver at all. So I uninstalled some of the additional drivers I had tried, uninstalled and reinstalled Xorg, and it still didn’t work right. I could get a Gnome window manager running, but the desktop was showing all black, and Compiz performance was drastically less than it had been.
So I installed xfce and tried that to see if I could get anything. Well, that worked. AND. The performace of Xorg with xfce is blindingly fast compared to the 15% average idle cpu usage I was getting before. So looks like the culprit may well be Gnome and Xorg or Gnome and compiz.
All I need to do now is to get Compiz working in xfce and to fix the annoying ability for something somewhere to forget what the volume was set to from the last reboot.