radeon 8500 in ydl2.3?

[R Shapiro]

I just installed a Radeon 8500 agp card on my G4/450 at home.  This is
mostly an osx machine, but I have found it useful in the past to run
linux on it.  It has a YDL2.3 installation on it, which used to work
fine with the original Rage128 card.  I'm having less luck running
linux with the Radeon.

If I boot with 'novideo', the console is fine but I can't run X.
Since my main use of linux on this machine is for telecommuting, and
since I can't telecommute effectively without X, this isn't useful.

If I boot without any video specification, the machine boots fine but
consoles are invisible.  I can log in by typing blindly, and get
console video back via 'fbset -a 1280x1024-8'.  I would have expected
I could accomplish the same thing by including a video= kernel
argument, but I can't find one that works.  Is there one?  I used to
use video=aty128fb:1280x1024-8@60 (I'm doing this from memory so I
might have the syntax slightly wrong).  For obvious reasons this no
longer works, since I no longer have an r128 card.  I tried replacing
'aty128fb' with 'radeon' and 'radeonfb', but neither of those worked
either.

I'd be willing to blind-tyoe the fbset if I could get a usable X
working.  But so far, I can't.  If I use the radeon driver, the colors
are weird and the displayed cursor position is offset from the actual
position.  If I use the fbdev driver, the colors are even weirder, and
I can only run at depth 15/16, not at 24.

I'm running the default YDL2.3 kernel, 2.4.19-4a.  I'm happy to switch
to a newer kernel if it will fix this problem.

Fwiw I'm using the Radeon card with an Apple lcd17 through a DVIator
dvc->adc adapter.  This is the same configuration I was running before
(successfully) with the r128.  

I still have the Rage128 card -- would it be feasible to use this as a
pci card rather than agp, and get linux to use it for video?


Thanks -

-- 
rshapiro@bbn.com