Slow scrolling in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server

[deltatux]

Hey guys,

I just installed Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS and I immediately notice something's not right. It seems like text is scrolling very slowly down my screen when I do directory listings or if it's printing lines of text on my screen. It used to be butter smooth in 9.10 but now it feels like Ubuntu's having some rendering issues rendering the bash shell on Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS smoothly.

I'm running Ubuntu Server on VirtualBox 3.2.4 on Windows x64. I also tried installing the guest additions but that didn't fix a thing.

Is there a way to fix this?

Thanks,
deltatux

[Sasquatch]

Sorry, but this is a framebuffer issue. It's not going that fast on my main system, let alone on a VM where things are even slower. Just tested it with my 10.04 VM and it scrolls about as fast as on my Host (also 10.04). Nothing VB can do about.

[deltatux]

Sorry, but this is a framebuffer issue. It's not going that fast on my main system, let alone on a VM where things are even slower. Just tested it with my 10.04 VM and it scrolls about as fast as on my Host (also 10.04). Nothing VB can do about.

Is there a way to fix this framebuffer issue? I did suspect a possibility that it's a framebuffer issue. The strange part is that this issue never existed on 9.10, and other Linux distros. Only on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. On the Ubuntu forums, people are saying that it's a VirtualBox issue and I'm guessing you're saying it's an Ubuntu issue?

All I need I guess is to fix this framebuffer issue, any pointers to how I should tackle this?


Thanks,
deltatux

[Perryg]

My understanding on this is: "The slow drawing performance is because they switch into VGA16 mode (for virtualization this is the worst graphics mode you can imagine) if no graphics card of Intel, AMD or nVidia is found." I asked about this some time ago when 10.04 was still in beta and so far there is no fix from Ubuntu and VBox has not worked on a work around AFAIK.

I believe that if you ssh into the server or vRDP/RDP into it you don't see this issue, but it has been a bit since I tried. I will try again this evening and let you know.

Edit: Yup using putty and ssh is smokin' fast

[Sasquatch]

VRDP will give the same slow scrolling. As I said before, my physical install scrolls with the same speed.

On the Ubuntu forums, people are saying that it's a VirtualBox issue and I'm guessing you're saying it's an Ubuntu issue?

People always blame a problem when they don't know what they are talking about or have even tested it themselves. I think the real problem is plymouth. I already had a few issues with that when I ran 10.04 in a VM and others see issues too with it, physical and virtual. It has such ridiculous dependencies that you can't remove it without breaking your system or removing 80% of it. Just to point it out: libplymouth2 depends on mountall. Mountall is a dependency of upstart. Upstart can't be installed without mountall (and mountall does just that, mounts all file systems on boot) and too many packages depend on upstart.
So there is no way to get rid of the possible cause because it's just like MS IE, too deep in the dependency tree. I never liked that Canonical (company behind Ubuntu) switched to plymouth, only to have a flashy boot screen. Who cares about that, you only see it for a few seconds until you log in and that's it. It even slows down the boot IMO.

Enough ranting from my side .

[savgur]

See my topic, it is same problem, and I find some solution: http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic. ... 71#p144371

[Perryg]

Thanks savgur
I tried it and it works great. I have been so busy and just have not found the time to research this.