Xorg Problems Radeon7500 iBook G3

blackjok3r · n00b Joined: 13 Feb 2005 Posts: 16

Hey again, hope someone can help me with this. I have come so far and yet cannot get x working now.
I can get x to start as long as I have no console what so ever. So I have to blindly login to root and type 'startx'
I also installed the xdm display manager and enabled it on startup which gives me similar results as far as what the screen looks like, however I cannot reboot or shutdown so no logs seems to be generated.

I get a black screen that then closes to a white grey type screen where upon I can type reboot and the computer restarts. I have compiled 2 kernels and set them up in yaboot so I have a console with one option and KMS enabled in the other one. My xorg.conf file was copied from here however this is old and did not work. I '#' out the top few sections and it then loads. I also seem to get similar results with having no xorg.conf file.

My xorg.log file using the xorg.conf is listed below. Another log file using no xorg.conf file is underneath it. Can anyone make sense of it and steer me in the right direction here? I am so close. I have emerged xorg base and open box and all dependencies as well as xdm display manager, this took a few days.

josephg · Posted: Sun Jul 30, 2017 2:36 am Post subject:

look at the framebuffer/drm modules in your kernel
_________________
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." Edward Abbey

blackjok3r · n00b Joined: 13 Feb 2005 Posts: 16

Thanks. That's what I have been playing with although not getting very far. I'm recompiling the kernel now for about the 5th time.. Really learning a lot how things work, but this mac is so old its been very hard. If I don't get somewhere soon its going to be a web server or something haha. I have a booting framebuffer console no worries its just X that's giving me problems.

What I want is no frame buffer device and the radeon driver enabled to give me KMS, but I seem to get an issue that I have no console with the frambuffer drivers disabled. Hopefully I don't have to recompile everything as it took about 24H to compile Xorg-server +XDM and openbox alone.

josephg · Posted: Sun Jul 30, 2017 2:57 pm Post subject:

have you searched for other threads with similar issues as you? for eg. this post and that whole thread.. you might find something useful.
_________________
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." Edward Abbey

limn · l33t Joined: 13 May 2005 Posts: 997

Trying to resurrect and even older iBook as dual Debian and Gentoo. The GPU is 3D RAGE Mobility L.

Using the netinst iso from
http://jenkins.kfreebsd.eu/jenkins/view/cd/job/debian-cd_sid_powerpc/ws/build/
upgrading the kernel and installing LXDE and switching from the default lightdm to lxdm can log in to the GUI and use xterms.

Do not have a working gentoo-sources kernel and instead boot Gentoo using the Debian kernel and initrd. X is not installed yet.

Creating a powerpc gcc with crossdev on an x86 is falling in C++ stdlib.

blackjok3r · n00b Joined: 13 Feb 2005 Posts: 16

You can use a debian kernel with gentoo? If that's the case I think I will do that if I cant get it working soon. I had lubuntu 14.04 installed but the Xserver was all garbled and colors were wrong. However that was right at the start before I tried to use gentoo, and I think those problems would have been easy to fix. Thanks for the tip. I might give that a go after my @world has finished recompiling lol. It was worth a try.

josephg · Posted: Mon Jul 31, 2017 8:13 am Post subject:

you could just lift /boot/config* from a working debian, and use that as the base /usr/src/linux/.config to build kernel in gentoo.

limn · l33t Joined: 13 May 2005 Posts: 997

Display has been the problem. The iBook languished because the fonts were distorted with Debian Jessie.

With Sid lightdm was a black screen with the mouse becoming an insertion point where the username and password are enterred.
The Emacs GUI has black where there is no text in the splash screen and does not redraw properly.

blackjok3r · n00b Joined: 13 Feb 2005 Posts: 16

My update @world needed to recompile gcc, so I'm waiting. 24H in so far lol. Burn't the debian install cd. Hopefully it can be installed to a usb stick to generate the kernel and I can get that out to compile in gentoo.

Installing debian now. Man its slow. I must have picked a bad mirror. I think maybe I shouldn't have picked a desktop environment either. I'm not even planning on booting it as its installed to a usb drive. I just want the installer to generate me x-config files and kernel config files so I can use them in gentoo. Oh well, I guess I just let it sit for another day.

Cancelled it and grabbed the .config file as suggested above. Compiling the Gentoo kernel with the Debian config file now Looks like a big kernel to compile. Could take a while I really hope this works.

EDIT:
Man I should have taken some drivers out. I can see this being a huge waste of time. Its compiling like everything lol. All I did was take out the frame buffers because debian had them all listed in a blacklist anyway.

blackjok3r · n00b Joined: 13 Feb 2005 Posts: 16

Well that's a no go. No boot. No display at all. Stops after loading the uniNorth driver and a few more lines of whatever gibberish its on about. I think I'm going command line only with this stupid thing. Simply no way to make it work.

EDIT:
Backing up gentoo install to a usb stick to archive for later. Going to try an install lubuntu 12.04 as I hear that version was working pretty well on these machines. If I can get that to boot I might use the kernel etc to boot gentoo X later on. radeon driver is not working on this machine in current version of gentoo. I can get KMS or Framebuffer not both. And X does not load anything.

EDIT2:
Lubuntu 16.04 boot live off USB stick KMS enabled = same issue as gentoo Xorg
Lubuntu 14.04 loot live off USB stick KMS enabled = same issue as gentoo Xorg
Lubuntu 14.04 boot live off usb stick no options passed = Colours wrong but has picture and works
Lubuntu 12.04 boot live off CD no options passed = Full Xserver.

Now to figure out what it is that causes this problem. The graphics driver has obviously stopped working at some stage, I hope I can get 14.04 to work at least so I can have recent web browser.

EDIT3:
The issue is defiantly being caused by a conflict in the new kernel and radeon driver for the old R100 chip. (Radeon 7500) I can only use Lubuntu version 12.04 with KMS disabled. Using KMS gives no video output. Hopefully the old kernel can be used successfully with gentoo otherwise I am stuck with Lubuntu on this system. But at least I can use it now. I can't believe I have wasted this much of my life on this. 3 weeks off work and pretty much back where I started haha. I learn't a lot about Linux though and built a few other systems while I was at it.
.

limn · l33t Joined: 13 May 2005 Posts: 997

Booting gentoo-sources-4.9.34. Did not use the Debian config.
Can bring up twm which would not start until xterm was installed.
Now to decide which window manager to use and whether to move from ppc to ~ppc.