Yesterday served as a good example how far xorg has come in the last decade, on x86 at least. It is pretty rare these days that you have to do any serious editing of xorg.conf when installing Linux on a x86(64) machine - sadly that seems not to be the case if you're an old skool Mac user.
I spent a good chunk of my weekend installing Deb Jessie on my friends Power Mac G5. The install wasn't quite as smooth as Debian usually is on a PC but I was expecting that for obvious reasons.The main issues were that I had to blacklist the nouveau module to get as far as login and then Nouveau doesn't have working support for the GeForce 6600 so I had to build ye olde nv driver and write a small xorg.conf to get xorg working. Def. not Linux newb frendly stuff but once I got it running I was pleasantly surprised at how well it ran. I was able to open and edit 1080p h264 files in KDEnlive and watch Youtube videos in FullHD - quite impressive for a 9 year old machine!
I was looking forward to returning it to my friend to show him how much better it ran under Debian over Leopard so we were greatly disappointed when I got it back to his house only to discover we couldn't get Linux to output to his monitor which just gave an 'out of frequency' error for every xorg.conf config I threw at it. Leopard output a picture just fine onto his monitor with the same cable and I had no probs getting a 1080 display out of the G5 under Linux when it was connected to my HDMI TV.
Here is the xorg.conf that works fine when the G5 is plugged into my HDMI TV:
I tried many permutations and various options, tried adding in a modeline I calculated (with a web app) for the res we wanted etc etc with no luck - everything was always out of frequency.
X -configure
Failed to produce anything useful
dpkg-reconfigure xorg-xserver
Didn't do anything (when run as root) and reading the Xorg log seemed to indicate it wasn't detecting the right refresh rate for our desired res - hence my attempt at adding a custom modeline.
If it matters, I was connecting the G5 to my TV with a DVI to HDMI cable but we were connecting to his monitor using a DVI to VGA cable. The xorg log seemed to indicate it was reading the EDID OK in all cases.
So whats the easiest way out of this mess? I spent about 5 hours playing with xorg.conf tonight with no luck. Ideally there would be a script or app for OSX we could run that would examine the current display and output a working xorg.conf - apparently there is such a tool for Windows but I've not been able to find an OSX equivalent. If no such tool exists, whats the next easiest method to get a working xorg.conf on such vintage hardware?
Thanks!
I spent a good chunk of my weekend installing Deb Jessie on my friends Power Mac G5. The install wasn't quite as smooth as Debian usually is on a PC but I was expecting that for obvious reasons.The main issues were that I had to blacklist the nouveau module to get as far as login and then Nouveau doesn't have working support for the GeForce 6600 so I had to build ye olde nv driver and write a small xorg.conf to get xorg working. Def. not Linux newb frendly stuff but once I got it running I was pleasantly surprised at how well it ran. I was able to open and edit 1080p h264 files in KDEnlive and watch Youtube videos in FullHD - quite impressive for a 9 year old machine!
I was looking forward to returning it to my friend to show him how much better it ran under Debian over Leopard so we were greatly disappointed when I got it back to his house only to discover we couldn't get Linux to output to his monitor which just gave an 'out of frequency' error for every xorg.conf config I threw at it. Leopard output a picture just fine onto his monitor with the same cable and I had no probs getting a 1080 display out of the G5 under Linux when it was connected to my HDMI TV.
Here is the xorg.conf that works fine when the G5 is plugged into my HDMI TV:
Code:
Section "Device" Identifier "card0" Driver "nv" EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen0" Device "card0" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Viewport 0 0 Depth 24 Virtual 1920 1080 EndSubSection EndSection
X -configure
Failed to produce anything useful
dpkg-reconfigure xorg-xserver
Didn't do anything (when run as root) and reading the Xorg log seemed to indicate it wasn't detecting the right refresh rate for our desired res - hence my attempt at adding a custom modeline.
If it matters, I was connecting the G5 to my TV with a DVI to HDMI cable but we were connecting to his monitor using a DVI to VGA cable. The xorg log seemed to indicate it was reading the EDID OK in all cases.
So whats the easiest way out of this mess? I spent about 5 hours playing with xorg.conf tonight with no luck. Ideally there would be a script or app for OSX we could run that would examine the current display and output a working xorg.conf - apparently there is such a tool for Windows but I've not been able to find an OSX equivalent. If no such tool exists, whats the next easiest method to get a working xorg.conf on such vintage hardware?
Thanks!
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