Re: Installing nouveau hints?

[Stephane Louise <luigi+online@nerim.net>]

Hi,

Gnu Turd wrote:
> I installed squeeze on a PowerBook G4 and was unhappy with the
> performance of the nv driver trying to use Blender & for graphics in
> general.
>
> 0000:00:10.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV34M
> [GeForce FX Go5200] (rev a1)
>
> I tried setting up a xorg.conf and using nouveau, but couldn't get to
> X.  So I "upgraded" to sid/development, but it is still using the
> 2.6.32.5 kernel.  I gather that nouveau has been added to the kernel
> of 2.6.33 and up.  So I thought I'd try setting the machine up as a
> mixed system.  I added the sid repositories to my sources.list and
> made unstable the default release in a /etc/apt/apt.conf.  I attempted
> to install linux-headers-2.6.33-2-powerpc, which I gathered might
> support nouveau better, but got unmet dependency errors.  It there a
> way to force apt-get to install a kernel on the experimental
> repository?

I don't know for RV34, but for RV42 (the card in the PowerMac Quad G5), 
and for the Nvidia cards of my AMD-64 at work, the Nouveau drivers are 
the default drivers (that is, what is automatically configured with 
xorg, with the official kernel of squeeze, so far). Nonetheless, for 
PPC, Nouveau (at least in 2.6.32-squeeze) is not usable: this is 
probably an issue with endianness because the screen mostly knows 3 
colors with the nouveau drivers: black, dark grey and white, and when 
X11 thinks it displays colors its mostly unuseable.

That's my experience so far, so I stick with the "nv" drivers.

Stéphane