sumarise ppc problems

[volvoguy]

On Sat, 25 Dec 2004 10:25:11 +0100, altern <enrike at altern.org> wrote:

> great. I was not that difficult, was it?.

Nope, not at all! In fact, it sounds like I'm going to be helping a
friend install Ubuntu on his Powerbook this weekend. :o)


> In myy case I have a 12" powerbook G4, 1.3mhz, GeForce FX Go5200

For the record, mine is the current G4 12" iBook - 1.2Ghz, 256Mb RAM
(for now), ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 w/32Mb DDR SDRAM.


> A - wireless networking : Not working
> I havent got into this at all. I kind of rememer that there were some
> emails about it in the list

Not working for me either (Airport Extreme with a Broadcom chip). I
WAS surprised though that Ubuntu completely recognizes the card. It
listed all the details about it when lspci or dmesg. (I forget, and
it's all packed up to go to my parent's today).


> B - modem : Not supported

Don't really need, so I haven't tried.


> C - graphic card : No hardware acceleration? I only get thousand of colors
> i havent gone into this. just noticed that the display only displays
> thousand of colors as the ubuntu desktop background's gradient is not
> properly displayed. Also i notice that OpenGL applications (i program
> opengl under python) run pretty slow, so i guess there is no hardware
> acceleration.

This one confuses me a little. My xorg.conf file (I'm running Hoary)
is set to 24 bpp, but photographs and backgrounds look dithered to me.
There's a "usefbdev" (or something like that) in the config file that
I don't recognize. It's mentioned a lot online, but only how to turn
it on and off - not what it actually does. Now, that said, 3D
acceleration *seems* to be working here. All of the 3D screensavers
perform at an acceptable speed.


> D - kernel : which one to use for your machine?
> THere are different kernels (note that i dont know much about this at
> all so i am not sure about this at all) to be installed i use the
> default one, however my machine is a G4 and i was thinking which would
> be the difference is i would be ussing the G4 kernel. Maybe some of the
> issues iam describing would be solved?. Also how to do this? just
> install in the sinaptics manager the G4 kernel? do i need to set
> somewhere that ubuntu uses by default the new kernel?

I installed the current (2.6.10 ?) kernel from Hoary last night and
didn't have any problems. Are you thinking of the "power-4" or
something? I think there are a few kernel options for other PPC
machines - like IBM's servers.


> E - ALT key wont work on spanish keyboard so i cannot access the @ #¬ \|
> [] etc... symbols (same for german keyboards aparently)
> The solutions for this sound pretty bad no apply ;-) I havent done it yet
> http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/support/solutions/ydl_general/keyboard_german.shtml

Yep. One of those many modifier keys down in the bottom row wasn't
working right. Specifically, I couldn't find any combination that
would take me to a different TTY.

I'll post some of the lspci and dmesg stuff later. 

Merry Christmas!


-- 
Aaron

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