On Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 02:49:31PM +0100, Magnus Pfeffer wrote: > I recently obtained a Motorola Powerstack (PPC 604e, 128 MB Ram, > Network/Sound/SCSI (wide) onboard) that came equipped with a Cirrus Logic GLD > 5446 PCI graphics card. The BIOS identifies itself as Motorola Open Firmware > Version 1.2 RM11. I did not find any documentation or newer firmware on the > web besides some "Motorola Firmware" that is some ARC firmware intended to > boot Windows NT for PowerPC or IBM AIX and refuses to boot linux :(
I don't think there are a lot of people using this sort of hardware, which is probably why you're having so many problems. [...] > I tried the installed Cirrus Logic card and encountered 2 problems: > First, the debian packages come without the cirrus.o module neccessary to > drive the card, even though the changelog has entries for this card that > refer to bug fixes for the ppc architecture. Upstream doesn't build this module for Linux/PowerPC by default. I suppose I could turn it on, but given your other bad experiences I don't feel at all confident that it would work. > Second, trying to use the vga.o module leads to a complete crash of the > system. The console stays blank, a network login is no longer possible and > users who are already logged in only get "illegal instruction" error > messages, whatever they try to do. No logs are written, and so I have no idea > what happens. I tried with the "UseFBDev" and "NoAccel" on and off. Ugh. That's really horrible. > Next I got a Matrox Millenium, and tried the mga.o and vga.o module -> Same > crash. The kernel framebuffer worked flawlessly (tested with fbi and mplayer) Ugh. > Finally I tried an ATI Rage 3D II+DVD (some Mach64 variant), but the Motorola > Open Firmware would not recognize the card (blank screen instead of the > BIOS). The Powerstack booted nonetheless, and the linux kernel framebuffer > found and used the card. XFree86 with the ati.o driver did not crash the box, > but instead complained that the "card is not initialized" and refused to > start. But it still hosed the framebuffer, which was unusable after starting > X. :( > I searched google and this mailing list for similar problems, but this kind of > machine seems to be rare, and I found no further hints. A friend of mine > bought the same machine and claims that suse linux runs out-of-the-box which > makes me think that a hardware problem in this specific model could be less > likely. SuSE patches the hell out of their XFree86 (to be fair, all the major distributions do). That could have something to do with it. > I found -dbg packages for the XFree86 servers. Is there some way I could use > those to pinpoint the problem? As I wrote earlier, attempts to create logs > from the crashing X server always failed with 0-byte-sized log files or > ext2fs errors in the log file. Makes me think the kernel might have panicked. > > Any ideas? I suggest trying to find someone on the debian-powerpc mailing list with some experience with your model of machine. We can then harass Michel Dänzer for assistance with the driver issues. ;-) -- G. Branden Robinson | "Why do we have to hide from the Debian GNU/Linux | police, Daddy?" [EMAIL PROTECTED] | "Because we use vi, son. They use http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | emacs."
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