A similar bug happens on my iMac G5 => it’s not just an Intel issue but also happens on ppc. Just installed Debian a couple of days ago with the actual network install procedure. My motivation was that MacOS X 10.5 is the „latest“ release the iMac can take, which is too old to use modern web technologies, and it’s definitely slowing down the iMac so I wanted to try a modern OS with lightweight options. As a Linux newbie, I was delighted by the easy install procedure.
But when booting into Linux, it starts by rushing through all these text startup messages, but when switching to graphics modes, it ALWAYS ends with a black screen, prohibiting the X server to be useful at all. This happened the first time and every time, so it’s impossible to use the desktop environment. After ctrl-alt-F1, a tty login is possible, but nouveau sends error messages every 3-10 seconds stating exactly the „CACHE_ERROR“ message that appears at the end of the system log file that Serkan has provided. Which makes working in text mode a bit irritating… Even on shutdown -h now, the X server takes about 2 minutes before it is forced to stop, still producing these error messages. I guess the nouveau driver hangs somewhere so it can’t shutdown normally. Unfortunately, I can’t access my ext4 partition from Mac OS X (failed to compile ext2fs over Fuse), so I can’t copy /var/log/Xorg.0.log. And as the X server is useless with a black screen, I can’t configure my mail program to send the log file. Plus, Linux can’t write-access the journaled Mac OS partitions. So I was a bit lost to transfer the information… Please just take this manually hacked information: My iMac G5 holds an NVIDIA FX 5200 graphics card, which is correctly detected by nouveau, according to the log file. The internal display is recognized correctly with its resolution of 1680x1050 at 59.9Hz. However, some strange errors are printed - like pixel frequency table missing for the DRM part of the driver. When booting with Linux nouveau.modeset=0, the X server shows up, but with weird colors that make everything almost unreadable. I’ve installed LXDE since I didn’t want to overload the old iMac (from 2004). However, first install was with GNOME and the result the same. Since I suspected GNOME and couldn’t get to any kind of configuration options, I erased the whole install partitions and started from scratch with LXDE. Nouveau version is from stable branch (1:1.0.11-1). For me, this issue is „grave“ since it ALWAYS prevents Xorg from starting up at all. So the whole Debian install is useless for me. Please feel free to ask for more details - and if you could give me a hint on how to transfer files out of my iMac just using tty mode and without write access to the MacOS partitions, I’d be delighted to send more information. Is there anything more to test - e.g. some more nouveau.modeset options that might help hunting down the bug? Is there a simple framebuffer driver available for the nvidia card, that would at least make X work so I could start using Debian before the bug is fixed? Thx a lot, Holger
