Hello, I recently inherited an old PowerBook G3 (Oldworld, I believe. It wouldn't boot the CD, and BootX is working fine.) and have been installing Debian on it. It actually went quite well, with only a minor heart-attack when installing quick, which made the system no longer boot (and me not knowing the reset key-combination. :-) But I got it working again and am now trying to configure XFree, which is where I am stuck.
I have tried using the fbdev, ati and atimisc drivers both from the stable (4.1.0) and testing (4.2.1) release. I've systematically tried different values for all options I imagined could have an impact, like using the kernel framebuffer interface, refresh rates for the screen and removing driver modules. The results are pretty much all similar. atimisc simply dies with a message of no screens found. I assume this is a wrong driver. ati and fbdev let the server start, but usually hang the whole machine with a black screen. fbdev sometimes lets me kill the server after a while (with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace), ati always hangs. fbdev also sometimes produces bands of garbled pixels, but then it always hangs the machine. The kernel framebuffer driver itself seems to be working fine. I've not had any screen problems working in text mode and 'fbi' (a framebuffer image viewer) also works without problems. I use the following kernel arguments with BootX: video=atyfb:vmode:14,cmode:32,mclk:65 I would appreciate any hints on which direction to go from here. Regards, Peter.