iMac G4 minimal install cli 11.04 leads to white screen

[gregounours]

How do I get a listed of detected outputs and their names so I can pass to the kernel which one to turn off as suggested in your link?

[linuxopjemac]

have a look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log for a start...

[rsavage]

If I was looking into this then I'd be booting into single user mode to test. I'd look at the other log files like kern.log, syslog and dmesg . I can't be specific as I don't have nouveau, but one of the links in the FAQ says to look at the kernel log. The Gentoo link says to look in /sys/class/drm.

It could be the openfirmware framebuffer offb causing the problem so you could try disabling it https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCFAQ#W...cs_problems.3F .

[hsiyao]

Hi everybody!

Very glad that I found this thread! I just got my hands on a 'broken' iMac G4 Lamp (700mhz, geforce 2 MX 400), that just needed a dvd and hdd replacement, and I always wanted this machine so I'm already really happy

Now I wanted to get Ubuntu 12.04 to run on it, and this ended in the same graphic problems you can read on a lot of forums. I didn't find a solution yet, but researched the problem a lot but now hit a dead end, a dilemma actually, where my skill level ends. At least I got to understand the different problems with different boot options and one special problem caused by nouveau.

I hope that by sharing all the information I collected somebody with a higher skill level might get to a solution (sorry if something was already said in this thread):

- I used Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which tries to use niveau as default driver for all nvidia cards, the "nv" driver is gone

- Trying to get the "nv" driver to work would be the logical step, but it's not installable, because of dependency problems (breaks packages, maybe this is a point to reasarch further) - so just defining "nv" as driver in the xorg.conf wouldn't change anything

- When booting without any additional boot options, you end up in a white screen that weirdly fades to black. You can't change to a console BUT you can log in externally via ssh. In this case the system actually uses the nouveau driver, but the UI locks up.

- Since I now kms is sometimes an issue, I deactivated it with nouveau.modeset=0 and the system finally booted, but I got to an screen with weird colors, as mentioned here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...7&postcount=13 and shown here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1917328

- Researching this weird problem a bit, I understood how this happened: The Xserver tries to load "nvidia", "nouveau", "nv" and if all this doesn't work falls back to "fbdev" and to make things worse uses it in only 8-bit... but why this fallback when disabling kms?

- I found out that nouveau actually needs kms to work (see here: http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/KernelModeSetting ), when it is disabled nouveau doesn't work, that's why the Xserver falls back to fbdev in 8bit

- I tried every bootoption I came across but always ended up in fading screens, sometimes white stripes or weird colors

- the only thing people are getting to work is using fbdev with 16 or 24 bit via xorg.con, but then you don't have any acceleration

>>>> so to make a long story short: you can either use nouveau and end up with a white screen, you can disable kms and end up with 8 bit color depth, you can't install nv. Maybe getting NV to work can be a solution if the dependency problems can be sorted out, latest version here: http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/p...eo-nv/download

Hope all this helps somebody to get closer resolving this issue!

[hsiyao]

I downgraded the imac to mintppc 9 (debian based), which roughly has the driver and program versions from ubuntu 11.04. Everything worked out of the box! But I won't give up and would really like to see, that the NV driver is incorparated in Ubuntu again by default. If you think this is a good idea, support it by voting on my ubuntu brainstorm idea:

[rsavage]

>>>> so to make a long story short: you can either use nouveau and end up with a white screen, you can disable kms and end up with 8 bit color depth, you can't install nv. Maybe getting NV to work can be a solution if the dependency problems can be sorted out, latest version here: http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/p...eo-nv/download

You can install nv. You just need to compile it yourself. There are instructions to do so in this thread. These are linked in the PowerPC known issues page and FAQ.

With nouveau have you tried disabling phantum outputs? Again look at the info and links in the FAQ.

To get nouveau working out-of-the-box you should raise bugs with the nouveau developers. No bug report = no fix. This would be a better solution than relying on the unsupported nv driver.

[hsiyao]

Hi rsavage and thanks for your answer...

You are absolutely right, that a bugreport should be filed, and I actually got encouraged by one admin at ubuntu brainstorm to do so with great tips on how to do it best... Before that I just didn't know where you could file it in a situation like this...

regarding compiling your driver on your own: csrunu wrote a great post in this thread with all steps how to accomplish this: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...9&postcount=12

Right now mintppc 9 is running on the machine, but when I've some free time I gonna try make Ubuntu 12.04 run on it with all the great tips I got in the different forums.

Cheers

Jens.

[moore.bryan]

First, thanks for all the work everyone's put into this thread. I'm running into an issue at

dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b

as it tells me "xaa.h: No file or directory."

Any ideas?

[rsavage]

From your other posts I'm guessing you are trying to compile this is 12.10? XAA has probably been removed in 12.10 http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTA0NDg (that's me speculating, I don't know for certain).

There is a new version of nv in debian sid (unstable) I believe http://packages.debian.org/sid/xserver-xorg-video-nv . It maybe worth seeing if you can get it back into Ubuntu too?

[moore.bryan]

From your other posts I'm guessing you are trying to compile this is 12.10? XAA has probably been removed in 12.10 http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTA0NDg (that's me speculating, I don't know for certain).

Didn't hear about that... Thanks for the link.

There is a new version of nv in debian sid (unstable) I believe http://packages.debian.org/sid/xserver-xorg-video-nv . It maybe worth seeing if you can get it back into Ubuntu too?

Unfortunately, it won't compile, claiming I don't have xorg installed.

Any other suggestions?