Framebuffer parameters and YDL 3 first impression

[Stefan Bruda]

Hi all.

I finally got some time to dust off my old iMac and attempt to put YDL
3.0 on it to see the goods with my own eyes before messing up with my
main machine (a tibook).

Now, I am not sure which iMac mine is from the ones listed on the YDL
hardware page, the closest one (both chronologically and in terms of
video card) appears to be the DV/SE 2000 entry, although mine is by no
means a special edition.  Anyway, my card is (as reported by lspci)
the 8M ATI Rage 128 Pro AGP 4x (as opposed to the 2X-AGP ATI Rage 128
Pro for the one listed).

Anyway, first the question, and then my opinions on the distro.

So in pass to the kernel the video argument aty128fb:vmode:16,cmode:32.
This worked perfectly with LinuxPPC 2000 Q4 (which I just dished off
to replace with YDL 3), no questions asked, but under YDL 3 timing
information for the framebuffer device is slightly off, so that the
VTs are shifted to the left enough that the first column of characters
falls out of the screen.  I fixed this by changing the timing
manually as soon as I can (i.e., in rc.sysinit after /usr is mounted)
by doing something like

    /usr/sbin/fbset -a -t 12738 187 13 24 1 96 3

Of course, I still have a part of the booting sequence with the first
column of characters missing in action, but I guess I can always look
into the system logs later.

My question is: Is there a more civilized way of accomplishing this
change in timing, preferably as soon as the framebuffer comes to life?


Now for the first impression: I found YDL 3 to be a good distribution
for people who want to run out of the box and not worry about anything
that happens in there.  It actually mostly worked out of the box,
except that video was utterly unaccelerated, and the VTs were shifted
(as ellaborated above).  Got to change the modeline and configure
acceleration by hand in XF86Config (so much for video configuration
being a thing of the past ;-) ), and behold, I got video acceleration,
AGP and all.

A thing that really, really pissed me off is kudzu.  It insisted to
mangle my carefully crafted XFree86 configuration, and in general mess
with stuff nobody had any business to mess with (in my opinion
anyway).  I could not get a working configuration before disabling the
damn thing (took me quite some time to figure this out too).  It also
promptly disabled my modem upon the first boot (although the said
modem works just fine once re-enabled by hand).

Speaking of configuration, the RH tools tend to suck when compared
with linuxconf.  Guess what, linuxconf is missing in action.

Oh, yeah, I do have some issues with the package selection process in
the installation stage.  Even if one goes to choose individual
packages, there are still things that install themselves no matter
what, and things that are simply not present in the list (although
they appear to exist on the CDs).  Oh well, this has been an issue
since LinuxPPC 2000 Q4 (the most recent package chooser worthy of this
name I know of), I guess I will have to get back to install and
de-install things by hand.  I am just wondering why awkward and
incomplete package selection tools continue to exist and even multiply
(at lest they do not become worse, I had the same issues when
installing YDL 2.3 a while ago).

I will not say anything about Gnome 2, because it has been some time
since I started to dislike it (we run RH8, now even 9, on the
departmental machines at school).  Is it just me or there is a
tendency towards bloated systems nowadays in the Linux world.  I did
appreciate though the nice antialiased fonts.

Things that do not work (and for which I did not have time yet to
fix): mozilla (which just dies without even bothering to draw a window
or something).

Overall impression: YDL 3 does an excellent job at "just working" (I
do assume here that the majority of people do get their video cards
autodetected and configured properly).  It also offers a nice GUI and
I would basically recommend it to any user of beginner or intermediate
level.

As for me, I think I will pass, preferring to upgrade my machine from
(horror) sources (did the kernel and X a while ago, glibc still to
come, will probably never upgrade Gnome).  YDL 3 is too patronizing to
my tastes.

Cheers,
Stefan

-- 
If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as
it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.
    --Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass