[Gslug-general] Linux on PPC

[Jarod Wilson]

On Tue, 2008-05-06 at 21:42 -0700, brett lentz wrote:
> On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 9:24 PM, Jeremiah T. Gray <jtgray79 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hey all, I'm thinking of switching one of my macs over to Linux and hear
> > that F8 is pretty good.  Can anyone (who's made a similar switch w ppc) fill
> > me in on usability issues?
> >
> >  Thanks,
> >  Jeremiah
> 
> 
> F9 is shipping in about a week.  I'd suggest waiting to get that, or
> just getting the rawhide bits, which are going to be very close to the
> shipped F9 bits.

Just note that X on some particularly old PowerPC systems seem to have
some issues with framebuffer devices -- I have an old PowerBook G3 I
recently inherited, and F9 installed on it fine, but you have to twiddle
some things to get X to start up, and its currently without accelerated
graphics. This thing has an old Rage Mobility M3, and the X server fails
to open the framebuffer device properly when configured to use the 'ati'
driver. Switching to the 'fbdev' driver gets me X.

Note that I've also got two old G4 towers, both of which have nVidia
graphics cards, and X isn't a problem on either of them -- heck, the
nouveau driver even works on (at least) one of them. So yeah, be wary of
potential X issues with F9/ppc if you have ancient ATI graphics, I
guess.


-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com