Re: Issues with Debian Lenny on Powerbook G4
On Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:50:59 +0200
Ralf Saalmüller <ralf@mail.ralf-saalmueller.de> wrote:
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> Hello!
>
> It's my personal opinion that the xorg version lenny uses, still 7.2
> and xserver v 1.3, are not useful and by far not up to date. i.e. no
> dual screen with xrandr which simply doesn't work as it should with
> that version of xorg.
>
> If dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg doesn't get you a working setup to
> tune things up, try the setting fbset gives or give xrandr a try.
>
> I only get an undisturbed screen after I changed the default
> resolution of 1440x900 with grandr to 1440x960 (Alu PBook G4). As
> MacOS X and Ubuntu do use the second tft via DVI it's not a problem
> with hardware neither linux. My guess is that xorg 7.2 simply isn't
> made for it. It's outdated, btw. 7.3 was released in 2007.
>
> Sad thing that debian testing is still based on that. Same problems
> with AMD64, for your reference, it's not a powerpc problem in my
> opinion and up to my experience.
>
> That might point to the sad fact, that debian isn't for the desktop
> but for servers? Is xorg 7.3 still not enough tested?
>
> Sorry, but it's really boring and I know I could switch.
>
> Ralf
The problem seems to be the r128 driver. As one of the earlier poster stated, that he had similar issues with version 6.7..while 6.6 had no problems.
I switched back to etch on this laptop and everything worked like magic.
So right now I am back to running etch on this machine, which is great. I just had to recompile a lot of the software that I needed (claws mail 3.4.0, pidgin, etc.) but it didn't take too long since I knew what I was doing and which libraries to install.
The main reason I had for installing lenny was so that I didn't have to recompile most of the software that I needed. However, i guess it still has some issues on the ppc architecture. For example, power management/sleep is broken.
Debian is actually the best for this laptop. I set up everything from a basic net install and I have a system that is super fast and efficient. Mac OS X crawled on this. And I don't any other distro for ppc will come close to this...and for ppc there really isn't much of a choice except for fedora and suse but both of them wouldn't even boot on this system (xorg issue again)....
but anyways debian etch has given life to this system...and im quite happy with it. I hope that the xorg issue gets fixed in lenny before that becomes stable
thanks,
amit
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