Xorg not working on PPC

[Andreas Mohr]

Hi,

On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 11:40:58PM -0800, xorg-request at lists.x.org wrote:
> Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2014 02:49:38 +0000
> From: Geoff Down <geoffdown at fastmail.net>

> Hello List,
>  I'm installing Linux on a PowerMac G4. Since the installation with
>  Gnome failed with a black-and-white horizontal stripey screen and
>  frozen system, I was advised to try Xorg instead.

Wording issue: GNOME is a desktop environment which *is* making use of Xorg.
They probably merely advised you to fall back to an Xorg-only troubleshooting way.
So whichever way it's configured, the problem solidly lies with Xorg startup
on your graphics card.

>   Depth:  32-bit Color

Might want to restrict that to 16-bit, since I'd assume that to be a bit
taxing given a semi-small 16MB VRAM amount.



Got a
    01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Rage Mobility 128 AGP 4X/Mobility M4
right here (r128 driver, too!), so things *do* work relatively okayish still (x86).
However very obviously I'd assume PPC handling to be quite a bit different to x86 handling.
So, as venerable Alex said, your first stop should be PPC-knowledgeable groups.

That said, the lockup / garbled screen might perhaps be caused by AGP issues.
On x86, AGP support often is provided by the intel-agp.ko module.
If that module is not available (or perhaps a driver setting is provided to disable it),
then driver operation falls back to PCI-only, which might improve reliability.

Also, you should check whether Xorg reports DRI as enabled
(and if so, try setting it to disabled, since that might be problematic too).

In general, try disabling as many of the driver options that you can find in
    man r128
, to try to figure out which setting caused such problems.

And of course check Xorg.0.log file content for specifics of all the specific
problem areas mentioned above, and more.


So far, *not* very specific help, but it might just end up helping anyway :)

HTH,

Andreas Mohr