Debian on 12" PowerBook G4 (867MHz)
Hey folks.
I have debian sarge installed on my 12 inch powerbook, and am using
Linux 2.6.3-ben2 kernel. I have a few questions that hopefully some
people on this list will be able to help with.
I'm no stranger to Debian or Linux on PPC, as I used to run Debian on my
old iBook without problems.
First, I can't seem to use the RivaFB drivers on this machine (I tried
applying the NV10 patch mentioned in the archives to no avail).. all I
get is vertical yellow lines (without external monitor) and pink lines
(with external monitor connected). It seems to work okayish with
video=ofonly, but it randomly locks up when using the console. Also, I
was unable to compile in "Nvidia DDC2/I2C Support", I get an error about
unknown i2c_* symbols. So question one is:
Should I be trying to use RivaFB on this hardware? Will the
openfirmware framebuffer be okay?
X seems to work okay though, which brings me to question two: OF
detects my external 17" Philips monitor connected, but seems to default
to 640x480, and X doesn't appear to see it at all, neither does fbset.
If I add UseFBDev to my XF86Config-4 then it doesn't start, saying that
it cannot find any framebuffer devices (yes /dev/[fb[0-1] exist), so
question two is:
How can I get multi-head working on this machine?
Also, X while looking pretty seems to be using software GL rendering,
because glxgears only gets ~89fps and the CPU load sits at 100% while
running, also playing back dvd's with ogle is very slow.
What packages should I have installed to get GLX/accelleration
working on this nv card?
Next, I seem to be getting random IDE bus resets on the combo drive...
it doesn't really seem to be doing anything wrong except slowing down
cdrom access... which I suppose doesn't really matter
Are the IDE resets on the combo drive important/need fixing?
Also related to the combo drive I'm getting errors when trying to use
eject "eject: unable to eject, last error: Inappropriate ioctl for
device". dev.cdrom.autoeject = 1 is a workaround, but it's a little
annoying having to mount and unmount a cd just to eject it, especially
if the media is damaged.
Is there a new version of eject/some package I am missing to
be able to eject media?
I am able to mount my Panther partition and my iPod using the Linux
firewire drivers, however the hfsplus fs driver doesn't seem to handle
the uid= argument, so I cannot access my files from my shell account.
How can I access my files from OSX and use gtkpod to sync my
music as a normal user?
Also, I know that broadcom won't release the specs for the airport
extreme card, so I thought I would mention that they suck. I don't
expect anyone to fix it any time soon, but if they don't know people are
upset they won't do anything about it. I think I'll email them.
And far from a list of things that are broken, I want to say thanks to
all the guys who make linuxppc work so well. Whoever thought of using
the sleep led as a hard disk activity indicator is a genius!
Overall things are brilliant, and I am happy to have Linux running on my
powerbook again. OSX is nice, but sometimes you want things to run at
full speed! Thanks for the great work, all the way from New Zealand.
Haere ra!
--
James Whatever
Director, Giant Robot Ltd
http://www.giantrobot.co.nz/
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