ATI Rage 128 Howto

[Herouth Maoz]

Well, after days of trying and checking with two distros and the 
documentation from a third, here's what I found out:

Rage 128 (the entire family) is a real drag. It is very picky in PPC 
Linux. You have to pass kernel parameters (aty128fb) as well as 
screen resolution on the boot command line, whether it is OldWorld 
(using BootX) or NewWorld (using the actual boot command "linux").

Now, many people here have been using this or that vmode and cmode. 
Turns out that, at least in the NewWorld machines, another method is 
accepted, using resolution, depth and refresh rate in this format:

    video=aty128fb:1280x1024-24@85

Which means 1280x1024, depth 24, 85 Hz.

For the install, I passed force-fbdev as another command line 
parameter. It didn't seem to be accepted without it. However, fbdev 
is then used as the driver in the X that's being install, and it 
doesn't give very good results. You should change it to r128, but add 
the option "UseFBDev true" to the X configuration (you can do that 
from the Display program under "System settings" in KDE).

Note that for the "UseFBDev" option to work correctly, you *must* 
pass aty128fb as a boot command line argument. If you use 
video=ofonly, "UseFBDev" will not respond well.

Herouth
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