YDL 2.2 on a Beige G3

[Romeyn Prescott]

Hi folks,

It's been months since I put any "quality time" in with my Beige G3 
MT at home.  My 4 year old has clocked many an hour with Toy Story 2, 
however...

Anyhoo, once upon a time I slapped a 20GB drive in the beast and did 
the dance with Mac OS X.  (To anyone who ever tried to install OS X 
on one of these things: my sympathies.  I hope the bills to your 
therapist weren't too excessive.)  I gave Mac OS X about 4GB and the 
rest was for OS 9.

Last night I acquired via download YDL 2.2.  I also realized that my 
OS X install was only 10.0.4 and that the Mac wouldn't boot from the 
10.1.2 install CD.  Not wanting to re-live THAT personal hell, I 
decided to zarch the OS X partition in favor of YDL 2.2.

First, some background on the Mac:
Beige G3 MiniTower, 300MHz
192MB RAM
20GB HD

It also has a DVD drive from a G4 and an ATI128 card from a B&W G3.

The video card is my problem.

Linux, neither the installer nor the finished product, seems to see this card.

I don't normally even have a monitor hooked up to the crappy on-board 
video.  I was going lightly nuts during the install process when 
BootX winked out leaving me with psychedelic patters on my 
display...and nothing else.  Then the light came on (that'd be the 
one over my head...) and I hooked the monitor up to the built-in 
port.  Success!  Though I could only run the installer in text mode...

I did that and booted for the first time to a command line.  Groovy. 
I ran Xconfigurator and chose 1024x768, 24-bit (I have a ColorSync 
17" display).

X bombed out.  I tried a plethora of Xconfigurator settings, but only 
when I select 640x480 @ 8-bit can I get Gnome to run.  (I mean, 
REALLY...why bother?!)

So I have two questions:
1) How can I get YDL/X to give me higher resolutions which I know the 
display can support, even WITH the built-in video
B) How can I get Linux to recognize the PCI video card (which is 
better) and forget about the built-in video?

(Is there a PPC equivalent of kudzu?)

TIA,
...ROMeyn

PS: Is there an IRC channel where y'all hang out?  I'm amazed by the 
zippy responses to most queries on this list, but you just can't beat 
real-time response if it's available!
-- 


signat-url: http://www2.potsdam.edu/dctm/prescor/signat-url.htm
-
What a signat-url is and why you should use one:
http://www2.potsdam.edu/DCTM/prescor/signat-url_defined.htm