No Video Mac 8600 was Re: Old World Mac

[Peter Gort]

Hi All,

I've done as Tommy suggested below, and lspci describes my video as

non-VGA Unclassified device: Apple Computer Inc. Control Video

Not a lot of useful info there.....  Mac specs turned it up as 2MB  
video ram, but there doesn't seem to be a graphic chip listed.  Video  
is on the logic board, not in a PCI card.  Googling turned up a  
couple of articles that basically suggested checking the refresh rates.

I ran sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg, and when it asked me to  
choose a driver obviously there wasn't one there that looked correct,  
so I chose the vga driver.  best resolution I choose as  
1024*768*16 at 75hz, settings I KNOW it works at, in any mac os  
version.  When it asked me for the bus I checked the output of lspci,  
which listed it at 0001:01:0b.0 .  Unfortunately the reconfigure  
routine doesn't take the bus number in hex format, so I took a punt  
and said bus 1.

Now when I get through the boot sequence to when X11 should start I  
actually get a second or two of blank screen (which is more than I  
got before!) before returning to text mode.  Can anybody tell me  
where to look for it's reason for failure?  surely it's logging it  
somewhere?

Peter
PS this is Kubuntu Hoary, but I don't think it matters just yet...  
gotta get kdm running!

On 21/08/2005, at 12:38 PM, Tommy Trussell wrote:

> On 8/20/05, Peter Gort <pgort at iprimus.com.au> wrote:
>
>> I have been given a Powermac
>> 8600/250 with 224MBs of ram.  ...  Worked perfectly first time
>> except.....
>>
>> No X11 .  Text mode is working perfectly but no X11.
>>
>
> You will want to identify your video hardware for future reference.
> You can use the "lspci" command to look at the PCI devices -- one of
> them may say "display controller" and list the chip it uses.
>
> You can do some Google searches and be sure to include keywords linux
> and the display chip model.
>
> Also do a Google search on your monitor's model number and find its
> EXACT video characteristics. You want to know Vertical frequency and
> Horizontal frequency, for instance. Both may have an acceptable range.
>
> Then issue this command
>
> sudo dpkg reconfigure xserver-xorg
>
> and go through all the prompts. That might get you going. If not,
> there may be some further hints on the pages that list your video
> card. I can't remember if the video on your model is built in or on a
> separate card.
>
> On an old Power Mac 9600 I was trying to get running, it turns out the
> video card that comes with it is NOTORIOUS for being hard to use with
> linux, so I got a much easier to use card on eBay, and made a lot more
> progress.