Re: Some questions, plus hfsprogs is missing

[James Madgwick <james@madgwick.xyz>]

On Sun, 25 Apr 2021 19:28:53 +0200
"Johannes Brakensiek" <letterus@codingpastor.de> wrote:
> I’m using a Radeon HD 6570 now in a PowerMac11,2 and it works quite 
> well - it is as fast as I’d expect it to be from a machine of this 
> age. The PowerMac11,2 already has got PCIe (1.00) of course, so I 
> don’t know if it is specific to your machine’s architecture.

I imagine the PCIe bus is a big advantage as it won't have suffered the
same code rot that AGP has. I don't get the impression that Linux
support for AGP was ever totally working. The HD 6570 has good support
in 'radeon' which has been improved even recently. Linux supports this
generation of GPUs far better than any other OS.

I've got a PCI ATI GPU somewhere around; I might try that and see if
the problems go away. If they do it will confirm the issue as specific
to AGP cards.

> You probably need to boot the install CD/image, mount your Debian
> root and boot partitions, chroot into it and reinstall grub.[2] The
> device IDs probably have changed by inserting the new drive. So, yes,
> it would have been better to do the install with all disks inserted,
> I think.

I've since installed a new SSD (Kingston A400) and I was able to
install MacOS followed by Debian. Both show in the OF boot picker and
the system automatically boots into Debian. I'm not sure why the boot
picker option was lost previously. Probably the interference by MacOS,
or a flat PRAM battery.

On Sun, 25 Apr 2021 20:49:47 +0200
John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> 
> Please wait until my fix for NSS has landed in Debian unstable so
> that the SIGILL issue has been fixed. It doesn't really make much
> sense to try to test Firefox before that.
> 
> The hfsprogs package had to be moved to non-free because Apple's APSL
> license is not considered DFSG-compliant [1] which is currently not
> available in Debian Ports as Debian Ports has the packages of the
> "main" section only.
> 
> I have asked the Debian Ports FTP admins already to add "contrib" and
> "non-free" for Debian Ports but so far that hasn't happened yet.

I'll wait for these fixes to land and for the Ports repo to be updated.
I'll try and remember to check back in a few months time, hopefully the
changes will have propagated by then.

On Wed, 28 Apr 2021 00:54:39 +0200
Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola@libero.it> wrote:
> I don't know which applications do you use, but for me things are not
> as bad. I have both a PowerBook G4 and an iMac G5 now running Debian
> with both ATI Radeon and things are quite nice. Moving windows along, 
> scrolling in most application is quite acceptable. I use GNUstep 
> (obviously) and GWorkspace, Ink, Graphos run quite well, no
> noticeable lag. Xterm is blazingly fast, Terminal.app is less, but
> that's the code, still usable though. So something is not working at
> your place.
> 
> Graphics is accelerated, so with wrong textures but one can see that
> it is working!
> 
> So on your system, which is better than mines, things must be more
> than usable!

I've just tried again, this time using mwm instead of MATE. Performance
is certainly better with this minimal window manager. Xterm is
responsive and usable. GTK apps are not perfect but are better than
with MATE. It would seem that Xorg simply suffers poor performance when
using 'radeon'. When using a lightweight wm this is simply less
noticeable, though performance is still better using software rendering.