HA! I underestimated the powerful effects of my boredom and the very
helpful advice of people on this list!!!
In other words, I got the xserver to work with very little tweaking.
Here's what you need to do to get X running in debian with a powermac
that has an adb mouse/keyboard:
1. Install the xserver-fbdev package via dselect, dpkg, whatever.
2. During the install script, when it asks you if you want to overwrite
any existing XF86Config file, say "yes"
3. Make sure you have disabled any "repeat-type" lines in gpm.conf if
you're running gpm.
4. Edit /etc/X11/XF86Config as root and enter the output of the command
'fbset -x' after all the modelines in Section "Monitor"
5. Make sure in the mouse section you have "Device /dev/adbmouse"
rather than /dev/mouse.
6. I included the following in the keyboard section to get my mac
keyboard working - but it needs a little more tweaking, now X has my
alt/option keys and command/open-apple keys swapped, i.e. when I'm on a
console I type command-Fn to switch consoles, but in order to switch out
of X I have to type ctrl-option-Fn, instead of ctrl-command-Fn. But
anyway, here's what I have now, I'll try to figure out how to fix the
previous problem:
XkbKeycodes "macintosh
XkbTypes "default"
XkbCompat "default"
XkbSymbols "macintosh/us"
XkbGeometry "macintosh"
XkbRules "xfree86"
XkbModel "pc101"
Also comment out the XkbDisable line. If any of the above is redundant
or incorrect, please correct me - I just took that from the XF86Config
file that was created when I had LinuxPPC installed.
7. One other thing I forgot - change the HorizSync and VertRefresh
lines to match what fbset -x said you need. I simply set mine both to
'1-300'
That's it. It probably should be simpler, but it doesn't take too long
once you know what to do. For anyone who did the quick fix where you
take the Xpmac server from LinuxPPC and make /usr/X11R6/bin/X a symlink
to it, you need to remove the link and put the file that was originally
at /usr/X11R6/bin/X back where you found it. Supposedly, the kernel
problems were just an incompatibility between the kernel that comes with
debian and Xpmac, so the standard debian kernel ought to work with the
fbdev server.
I do have one problem still and I'd love it if someone can tell me what
to fix. I'm sure it's something simple and I might figure it out once I
start looking at the man page for XF86Config again in a minute. When I
run X now, using the fbdev server and the XF86Config created as above
(by the way, I think that XF86Config file comes from
/usr/share/doc/xserver-fbdev/examples/), and at least with IceWM all the
windows on the screen are much bigger than they normally are. It's not
a big deal, but for instance, the Netscape mail configuration window was
too big to be displayed on the screen and everything has such big fonts
that I think I'm using the geriatric version of X. Again, I may
figure it out before you reply, but it would be nice to have the
information here on the list for anyone else trying to get X running
under debian on a powermac without resorting to trickery like stealing
binary files from LinuxPPC (I don't even know where the Xpmac server
comes from -- is it part of XFree86 or something else?).
Thanks everyone for all your help, you've been great,
I hope this will help somebody else with similar problems,
Will Dukes
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