iBook woes

iBook woes

[Chris Backas]

Hello all,

I'm having sound & video trouble with my iBook.. before I start, here's the machine's info:

Original iBook, 160MB RAM, modified with a 12GB HD, and it has an AirPort card.  I have a working tri-boot setup with MacOS 9.0.4, Mac OS X DP4, and Yellow Dog Linux
Champion Server 1.2.  I'm using yaBoot to boot the machine (BootX causes it to lockup instantly, and often it simply turns off when I try to use BootX) and as on now, Kernel
is 2.2.17pre10-ben1

First, the video trouble.  Using the version of XFree that came with YellowDog, X runs in 800x600x8, which is very ugly.  After about 15-30minutes of using X, the screen
would polarize and the computer would lock up hard (dead to pings etc).  So, I decided to upgrade to XFree 4, because that was listed as a solution for iMac trouble on
Yellow Dog's page.  I installed XFree 4, and although the lockups are now gone, I have a new (odd) problem.  The left 1/4inch of the image is displayed on the right
1/4inch of the screen =)  (Slightly raised up too)  There's no overlap, the entire screen is shifted to the left like this, and I'm still not able to get anything better than 8bit color.
In XFree's messages, I can see a message indicating that it thinks the video card has 468K of RAM.

Am I missing something obvious?  Do I need a specific video= line in my yaboot.conf file?


Ok, now for the sound.  Simply put, I've never heard a peep out of this thing under Linux.  Is the dmasound module the correct one for the iBook?  I have 'alias sound
dmasound' on /etc/conf.modules, and 'lsmod' lists dmasound as loaded (but unused). When I start X, I can see complaints from esd that /dev/dsp does not exist (it does)
But perhaps it's not setup properly?

There's a few other minor troubles (mainly with making MacOS not unbless my yaboot partition...) but these two ar e the big ones =)  Any help is appreciated.

Chris Backas


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Re: iBook woes

[Iain Sandoe]

Thu, Jul 13, 2000,  Chris Backas wrote:
[...]
> Ok, now for the sound.  Simply put, I've never heard a peep out of this
> thing under Linux.  Is the dmasound module the correct one for the iBook?
> I have 'alias sound
> dmasound' on /etc/conf.modules, and 'lsmod' lists dmasound as loaded (but
> unused). When I start X, I can see complaints from esd that /dev/dsp does
> not exist (it does)
> But perhaps it's not setup properly?

what does cat /dev/sndstat say ?
you should also find some lines in dmesg with "DMA sound" stuff in them...

I'd be interested to know what soundchip you have (AWACS version or is it a
Burgundy) etc.  which you can either find from those entries or from the
MacOS side...

Iain.

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Re: iBook woes

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt]

>what does cat /dev/sndstat say ?
>you should also find some lines in dmesg with "DMA sound" stuff in them...
>
>I'd be interested to know what soundchip you have (AWACS version or is it a
>Burgundy) etc.  which you can either find from those entries or from the
>MacOS side...

The iBook don't have an AWACS derivative. It's a different chip. The
basic DBDMA operations are the same, but all the controls go thru an i2c
bus. There's a driver for it in Darwin but not yet in Linux (but someone
is working on it).

Ben.


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Re: iBook woes

[Chris Backas]

On Thu, 13 Jul 2000 10:53:24 +0200, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:

>
>>what does cat /dev/sndstat say ?
>>you should also find some lines in dmesg with "DMA sound" stuff in them...
>>
>>I'd be interested to know what soundchip you have (AWACS version or is it a
>>Burgundy) etc.  which you can either find from those entries or from the
>>MacOS side...
>
>The iBook don't have an AWACS derivative. It's a different chip. The
>basic DBDMA operations are the same, but all the controls go thru an i2c
>bus. There's a driver for it in Darwin but not yet in Linux (but someone
>is working on it).
>
>Ben.

So I take it this means sound won't be working for awhile =)

Any ideas on the video problems I described then?  I find that more important anyway.

Chris Backas


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Re: iBook woes

[Christof Petig]

Hi Chris,

> Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 01:32:24 -0400 (EDT)
> From: "Chris Backas" <cbackas@rcn.com>
> Subject: iBook woes
>
> Hello all,
>
> I'm having sound & video trouble with my iBook.. before I start, here's the machine's info:
>
> Original iBook, 160MB RAM, modified with a 12GB HD, and it has an AirPort card.  I have a working tri-boot setup with MacOS 9.0.4, Mac OS X DP4, and Yellow Dog Linux
> Champion Server 1.2.  I'm using yaBoot to boot the machine (BootX causes it to lockup instantly, and often it simply turns off when I try to use BootX) and as on now, Kernel
> is 2.2.17pre10-ben1

I'm using a 64MB iBook (192MB RAM, 6GB HD) without an AirPort card. And I'm facing different troubles:

> First, the video trouble.  Using the version of XFree that came with YellowDog, X runs in 800x600x8, which is very ugly.  After about 15-30minutes of using X, the screen
> would polarize and the computer would lock up hard (dead to pings etc).  So, I decided to upgrade to XFree 4, because that was listed as a solution for iMac trouble on
> Yellow Dog's page.  I installed XFree 4, and although the lockups are now gone, I have a new (odd) problem.  The left 1/4inch of the image is displayed on the right
> 1/4inch of the screen =)  (Slightly raised up too)  There's no overlap, the entire screen is shifted to the left like this, and I'm still not able to get anything better than 8bit color.
> In XFree's messages, I can see a message indicating that it thinks the video card has 468K of RAM.

This sounds like it is still using offb (atyfb reports 4MB for me, offb 800x600 bytes ;-).
The screen move is due to a wrong base address calculation in XFree, I heard some rumors it was fixed in more recent XFree drivers (maybe even in 4.0.1).

Looks strange. What about video=ofonly? Does this work for you. IMHO a stable video system is better than a fast video system.

You might even give SuSE's beta XFree:
-----
XFree86 Version 3.3.5 / X Window System
(protocol Version 11, revision 0, vendor release 6300)
Release Date: August 23 1999
        If the server is older than 6-12 months, or if your card is newer
        than the above date, look for a newer version before reporting
        problems.  (see http://www.XFree86.Org/FAQ)
Operating System: Linux 2.2.14pre9SuSE ppc [ELF] SuSE
Configured drivers:
   FBDev: Server for frame buffer device
   (Patchlevel 10): mfb, afb, cfb8, cfb16, cfb32, NCR 77C32BLT (accel), ATI Mach
(using VT number 7)
---
a try. It does it's work here for three months and has never crashed my machine (8h/day use). Though with 16/32bpp the server restarts once the screensaver activates.

> There's a few other minor troubles (mainly with making MacOS not unbless my yaboot partition...) but these two ar e the big ones =)  Any help is appreciated.

Try changing the type (delete, recreate via 'C', worked for me) to Apple_Bootstrap. After this it booted well (for me), before this I saw the MacOS logo again. What about Open Firmware (see
my recent communication with Ben H., he has good points on this)

   Christof

PS: You may not be able to reach me within the next three weeks, I'm leaving for holiday 18:00 CEST.


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