Sauli Siren wrote:
> >
> > Do you run mprime with KDE? Right now I'm a new user (for Linux) and I
> > want to know if running mprime on Linux is faster than Prime95 on NT.
> >
> Actually I use a nice little utility called screen to run mprime with
> linux. It has the advantage that you can detach it from your current
> virtual console so that it continues to run when you log out. Later you
> can call it back to foreground to check output etc. Very handy.
>
> I don't know anything about NTprime but at some point I did compare mprime
> and prime95 in my computer (AMD K6 overclocked to 208 MHz) and mprime did
> seem to be about 3% faster than prime95. Of course there were no other
> programs running at the time. I understand that generally linux does
> handle multiple processes better than win95/98. But, as said, I don't have
> any information about NT. Anyway, the differences are so small that I
> wouldn't care ;)
I've found that on an otherwise idle system, Prime95 and mprime are exactly
the same. On a system that's getting some interactive use, mprime does quite
a bit better. This is probably because a lot of Win16 programs (and a few
poorly designed Win32 programs) constantly spin around in a message loop and
don't let anything of lower priority run.
As for watching the output, try using the open utility to automatically start
mprime on a virtual console. Here's what I use:
#!/bin/bash
echo "Resuming GIMPS..."
cd ~jason/mersenne
open -c 9 -- su jason -c "./mprime -d"
Then you can view the output with ALT-F9 from the console, or cat /dev/vcs9
remotely.
