YDL4.0: issues with FBDEV and XFree86

[Joseph E. Sacco, Ph.D.]

Beth,

YDL-3.0.1 is quite stable. The downside is that is many of the
applications and libraries are now quite old. Updating an application
will often cast you down into "dependency hell". I know this from
personal experience [:-)].

I am looking at rebuilding the X11 system to see if the graphics card
support problem goes away. One sticking point in my mind is Fedora has
moved away from XFree86 and is now using the X11 release from X.org. WEB
chatter indicates that there are incompatibilities between the two
releases so one must choose either one or the other. In an attempt to
avoid dependency hell I will stick with XFree for the moment. I wonder
what Terrasoft has in mind down the road.

As for the undefined symbols you encountered when installing
aty128fb.ko... When did this message show up? Did it show up when you
ran "make install_modules", or at some other point?

The reason I ask is that I didn't encounter the problem when building
2.6.9 from the source at http://www.kernel.org. I used the "default"
configuration for PPC that comes up when you run "make menuconfig"
without a .config file present. In this configuration the ATI drivers
are built directly into the kernel
        
        #
        # Graphics support
        #
        CONFIG_FB=y
                ...
        CONFIG_FB_ATY128=y     <<===================
        CONFIG_FB_ATY=y
        CONFIG_FB_ATY_CT=y
        CONFIG_FB_ATY_GX=y
                ...

I assume that if there were missing symbols the linker would have
complained when creating vmlinux.  It didn't.

-Joseph

=========================================================================

On Fri, 2004-12-10 at 15:12, Beth Johnson wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-12-10 at 11:53, Joseph E. Sacco, Ph.D. wrote:
> 
> > I used fbdev when running YDL-3.0.1.  It worked just fine at depths of
> > 8,15,16,24.
> 
> Perhaps I should downgrade to YDL 3.0? I've tried to roll a kernel with
> the 2.6.9-1.ydl.8 sources Owen just provided, and am getting complaints
> when trying to install aty128fb.ko about it needing unknown symbols
> "mac_find_module" and "mac_vmode_to_var."
> 
> It might make sense that the framebuffer in the newer Xorg just isn't
> working for this, because my original try with this machine was with
> Gentoo (2004.3) and I had to run the install disk with "video=ofonly" to
> be able to see the screen after the LiveCD loaded video. Never got it
> working with Xorg in that install (obviously, or I wouldn't be here,
> trying with YDL).
> 
> I'm not a kernel hacker, and the winderz-usin' husband is taunting me
> with calls of "8 pix."  This is a problem.  :-/
> 
> grateful for any help,
> Beth
-- 
Joseph E. Sacco, Ph.D. <joseph_sacco at comcast.net>