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I know that much, since the driver page (http://www.winischhofer.net/sisdri.shtml) states clearly that "There is no DRI support for the SiS 315/550/650/651/740/661/741/760/330."
The chip sucks, for sure, but this page shows that the chip can certainly do better than it does now (I have virtually the same set as the benchmarked laptop).

I think Douglas Adams* is spinning in his grave!

*-"The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he, by peddling second-rate technology, who led them into it in the first place."

I switched to Gentoo because it was the only distro (tried several versions of RedHat, Mandrake and even the latest Slackware, have'nt tried Debian yet) that would give me any kind of performance on my useless motherboard with an onboard Sis 530 Graphics Chip. Even Gentoo was kind of slow until I used the Sis drivers from http://www.winischhofer.net/linuxsisvga.shtml. This guy has a ton of really useful info for people with any of these old junky graphics chips and no budget for real equipment. The difference for me was night and day. I tried the new drivers in RedHat and Mandrake. Although there was an improvement, it was nothing like the improvement for Gentoo! The lesson of all this? I will never buy onboard video again! My next box gets Nvidia or something else that works!

Why would you do that, when someone has written perfectly good drivers already?

I'm really tired of hearing people bitch and moan about how nVidia's drivers aren't open source. 99% of the time I am all for hardware and software developers making source code available to the masses, but in this case, let's take some of the competition as an example. ATI just recently made good on their Linux driver support, if you call the same stuff that we have been using from the DRI project as being contributed by ATI. As for the rest, how are they? SiS, at least according to this source has no intention of putting forth genuine effort to help the non-M$-OS community. Matrox appears to be the only exception, but then again I don't have a matrox card so I don't know about the performance of their drivers. I have had no problems with the performance of the nVidia drivers regardless of the nature of their software licensing. Quit yer bitchin' and just be happy that the damn thing works in Linux (and BSD too!).

Learn to love the clickable link. Is it that hard to make links clickable?

Running Debian Linux 2.4.19 on a Shuttle SS40g. There are a couple of pages with instructions on how to set up Linux on these machines (here and here). The biggest prob on this machine regarding Linux seems to be the SIS 740 chip. You have to specify 'pci=bios,biosirq' as a kernel parameter even if the PCI bus seems to initialize fine without. You'll have probs with the modules otherwise. You also need a custom graphic driver from Thomas Winischhofers page and you have to configure X-Windows by hand.

I have graphics, USB, sound, network and firewire running fine for me. Note though that I did not even try to get 3D accel (DRI? DRM?) support configured.

As for Linux performance I have to confess and to display my ignorance towards performance freaks in public by saying: Yes, the performance is fine. For me. ;-D

regards,

-rolf

I'm running a SS50 right now, and it runs Linux fine- The biggest problem is the video is an SIS part that is not fully supported under linux- they won't release their IP. There is one page that has some details on what it takes to get it going (code and so-forth) but it's not simple- it takes a bit of work.

I like my ss50 a lot- a little pricey for a barebones system, but it is relatively quiet, and has been running without a hitch for a couple weeks now. The only thing I'm really missing at this point is a decent way to monitor the temperature sensors and fan speed under linux- I haven't had much luck with the lm-sensors package.