I have an Asus EeePC 1000HA.

I knew before I bought it that I wouldn't be doing any video editing or hardcore gaming, but I was disappointed to find that even simple flash videos play at low frame rates. Any sort of high quality video is unwatchable. But I just accepted this as normal.

However, I've been looking around the web for some games that will run well on Atom processors and 1GM of RAM. One of my favorite games is Assaultcube, and in multiple places I saw reports that the game "runs flawlessly" on netbooks. However, when I play it, it is unplayable even on the lowest settings. Yesterday I installed a Sega Genesis emulator, and it was struggling to even play Sonic 2 (calm down, I own the real game) on tiny resolutions.

I am beginning to think that this isn't normal. The video performance can't be this bad, can it? Is this a hardware issue? An issue with the OS? No issue at all?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Your problem might be the same one as mine. I could watch videos at first. But as time passed they started getting jerky. I could still watch them if they were cached first. So I had to go to the page, stop the video, wait for it all to load, then run it. 2 days ago they started jerking even if they were cached.

Running up Firefox took forever. I also run Evolution. It took an ungodly amount of time to switch from the browser to email or back.

I looked and the load on the machine was constantly above 3. The processor stayed at 80% and higher most of the time. Memory use was showing 20% or more most of the time, with spikes and/or slow creeps toward 60% (I have 2G, with 512M swap across the internal drive and a thumb drive, a situation that will change next week when I install a larger SSD). I noticed when running top that one process seemed to be intermittently high: HAL.

I killed the HAL (hardware abstraction layer) daemon and that fixed it. I wrote a script that kills the daemon when I login. But I consider that temporary. I started a post elsewhere asking if anyone had ideas on what to do about it.

You might try that: service hal stop. At worst it won't do anything for you. It certainly improved things for me. I haven't fond a downside so far. But what bothers me is I can't just uninstall it because other things want to come out if I try it, so I wonder if something isn't being handled properly without it.

What function does HAL serve and what will the consequences of stopping it be?

I'm not sure of the consequences for stopping it. That's why I asked a (still unanswered) question.

According to Synaptic's quick caption, it's used for adding new devices and new ways of connecting them. That is normal english that spells gibberish without further explanation. The manpage (hald) says it maintains a database of connected devices for applications to use and monitor. That's fine. But it still doesn't tell me anything about its importance or necessity.

I shut it off and everything still worked. I didn't think at the time to add and remove devices. I'll probably do that today. I suspect I won't see much difference, but I don't know that until I try. If I'm right, if there aren't any ill effects, I'd like to remove it. But choosing that option wants to remove a bunch of things that I don't see any relationship to: network-manager (including both kde and gnome versions), update-notifier, xfce4-session, sound-juicer, and several others. There may be a valid reason why those are tied together. But nobody has bit on the question I raised about it yet. So I can't be sure there aren't any gotchas.

Nonetheless, you might still want to try it in your case to see if it's the same problem. It will come back up after a reboot anyway, which is why I made a script to disable it until I find out there's a reason to keep it going (in which case I might be forced to use something other than Eeebuntu). At least you'd know if that's causing your video problem like it did with mine.

HAL= Hardware Abstraction Layer. I don't think it is a good idea or a proper solution to kill HAL. This is what basically handles Hardware to Software support. I would check either system logs or execute at command line: and see what might be complaining or causing errors.

There are some processes however you can look into removing from start up that may contribute to performance (but not always likely). Install sysv-rc-conf. Here is a website you can refer to that will help determine what you may need during startup or not: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=89491

You can also look into cpu frequency scaling: http://www.ubuntugeek.com/howto-change-cpu-frequency-scaling-in-ubuntu.html http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2005/11/04/enabling-cpu-frequency-scaling/

I know I was getting choppy video on my eee pc, and flash games were impossible. I have switched from GNOME to LXDE, which is a lightweight, faster Window manager which also is better on power. Now videos from sites like Hulu run fine. The only other thing I have done is to change my network manager from the one used in Gnome to wicd, which works in LXDE without using Gnome dependencies, not sure if that is part of the difference, but it might be. At any rate, switching to a lightweight desktop manager like LXDE, XFCE, or Fluxbox will definitely get you more speed and a longer battery life.

Since I apply these tips from the link below in Firefox, everything is snappier and I don't get choppy flash video anymore. And I still use Gnome desktop and Compiz:
http://www.universefirefox.com/how-to/how-to-speed-up-firefox-3

But since I am from Canada, I can't check the steaming quality of Hulu videos.

Edit: I still get choppy video. I tried HD flash videos from tv.com and these are unusable. I think the real culprit is Adobe flash nsplugin on Linux, not Gnome, not Compiz and not Eeebuntu. I tried Cruncheee, and I still get choppy videos with flash plugin. Every other applications are fast. So I suggest you vote for these bugs to be resolve:
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-1692
and
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-1370

I have to agree. Switching to LXDE has greatly improved all embedded Flash video playback (yes -- even Hulu) on my Eee 1000HE. Battery life seems better too, though I've yet to test it properly.

Eeebuntu NBR 2.0 + fewt's Eee PC ACPI Utilities.

and how would a knoob go about doing this? instructions? i want to try it b/c eeebuntu standard is pathetically slow with streaming video.

I assume you are talking about adding LXDE. It is pretty simple. You simply go top a terminal and type "sudo apt-get install LXDE"

Now the Network Manager doesn't work out of the box with LXDE. You have two options. First is to make Network Manager work with LXDE. You do this by opening up the autostart network manager file as root. It is in /etc/xdg/autostart. There is a line that says something like "ShowOnlyIn=GNOME." You can either delete, comment out this line, or add LXDE to it. The other way is to replace networkManager with something else. I have replaced it with wicd, which I like a whole lot better. If you have the correct repositories, it is as simple as sudo apt-get install wicd. There is a how to listed in the how to forum "Lose the Network Manager."

Then when you are your log in screen, you need to click on one of the options menus and chenge your session to LXDE. WHen you log in you will get the option to do this once only or make LXDE your default log in.

Cannot do this. I get: "Couldn't find package LXDE".

Connect to internet, open Synaptic, hit Reload, look for LXDE. It should be there, it's in the Ubuntu Universe repo.

I know when you apt-get it IS caps sensitive. Don't put lxde in caps, just type sudo apt-get install lxde"

If that doesn't work check what repositories you have enabled in your software sources section.

Strangely enough on my 701SD 8Gb 512Mb I got perfect video on Eeebuntu 8.10 when I upgraded to 9.04 everything went down hill from 59fps down to 10-15fps

the reason for the sharp drop on 9.04 is due to a poor intel driver and the xorg not being very eee friendly.

for this reason we are working to resolve this BEFORE we launch eeebuntu 3 to you all. therefore hopefully the performance should match the current v2 levels.