On Fri, Sep 29, 2006 at 09:21:27PM +0200, Attilio Fiandrotti wrote:
> Hi
>
> I just completed a preliminary survey [1] about graphical
> debian-installer usability on PPC machines and it turned out that there
> are two distinct kinds of issues that currently block PPC users from
> using the g-i.
>
> *Graphical issues: PPC testers always report crashes when hw
> acceleration iss enabled, but luckily such crashes can be easily avoided
> by disabling hardware acceleration and chip-specific modules, or better
> by removing gfxdrivers them from the filesystem.
> So, even if not optimal, disabling hw acceleration does the trick and we
> can live well.
I'm curious about the mach64 problems at least. But I need someone to
tell me more than 'it crashes'. The driver should work (mmio byte swap
asm code is included) but I have never tested it because I don't have
the hardware.
If someone wants to run tests, start with running dfbinfo, and if that
works run df_dok.
> *Input devices issues: In many cases it turned out that the key to get
> DFB running on PPCs is disabling the linux_input module.
> Whenever a success was reported (except for PowerBook6,7 IBook's), it
> was because the linux_input module was disabled.
> We also noticed that many i386 laptop touchpads do not to work properly
> when the linux_input module is enabled, and hence the user has to plug
> in an USB mouse to use the installer.
linux_input is crap is the touchpad is in absolute mode. Fortunately all
my laptops have synaptics touchpads which supports relative mode in
hardware/firmware. I have though about fixing the problem a couple of
times but since my hardware works I haven't had enough motivation :) I
was thinking about using tslib for this.