Re: Bug#390565: Patch for the graphical installer on PPC boxes

[Attilio Fiandrotti <attilio.fiandrotti@gmail.com>]

Rick Thomas wrote:
> On Oct 2, 2006, at 2:28 PM, Sven Luther wrote:
>
> >  I am building a new image, and uploading it, stay tuned.
>
>
> I tried the new image (from http://people.debian.org/~luther/g-i/ 
> powerpc/gtk-miniiso/mini.iso dated 02-Oct-2006 05:07) on my PowerMac  
> 3,5 with the Radeon video card.
>
> /proc/cpuinfo=  PowerMac3,5 [69 (PowerMac G4/733MHz Silver)]
> lspci=          ATI Technologies Inc Radeon RV200 QW [Radeon 7500]
> /proc/fb=       0 ATI Radeon QW
>
>
> When I did "DEBIAN_FRONTEND=gtk ; debian-installer",
>
> I got dropped into the text mode installer with the error message:  
> "Framebuffer not available. Disabling graphical frontend."
> I tried it with all combinations of enable/disable of "linux_input"  and 
> "radeon", with the same results.
>
>
>
> I also tried it on another machine with ATI Rage128 graphics card
>
> /proc/cpuinfo=      PowerMac3,1 (PowerMac G4 AGP Graphics)
> lspci=              ATI Technologies Inc Rage 128 PF/PRO AGP 4x TMDS
> /proc/fb=           0 ATY Rage128
>
> I only did this one with both disables in place (unmodified /etc/ 
> directfbrc file).
>
> It also gave me the same error message about "Framebuffer not  
> available" and dropped me in the text mode installer.
>
> Is it possible that this image is broken in some fundamental way?

looking at /proc/fb dumps, the framebuffer must have been nitialized 
correctly.
Did you enter "export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=gtk" or "DEBIAN_FRONTEND=gtk" 
before running debian-installer?
In the latter case, the DEBIAN_FRONTEND variable simply may not have 
been made visible to debconf, try again with "export ..." before running 
debian-installer and let's see if this works.

cheers

Attilio