OK, I'm back for more help... Thanks to the help I got from the list, I've got my StarMax running nicely with a 2.4.20 kernel -- provided I only log in over the network and provided I don't attempt to mess with the framebuffers.
I'm working with a StarMax 5000/300 Twin Turbo, running Sarge. It's got OpenFirmware 2.0.2. This box has two graphics adapters, a builtin ATI Mach 64 GT (4 MB) and an IMS TwinTurbo 128 (8 MB) on a PCI card. If Quik loads the kernel with `video=ofonly' the ATI card is active with the offb driver as /dev/fb0. The (inactive) TT128 shows up as /dev/fb1. The main problem here is that the display is heavily distorted by waviness. The framebuffer is at 1024x768, and console text is almost totally unreadable. The amount of distortion varies with the content of the screen, however, so (for example) the Debian xdm login shows a very clear and undistorted Debian logo on the login box, but the text in the xconsole is completely illegible. In X, the distortion tracks the movement of windows about the display. If I boot without any video= argument, _sometimes_ it will boot cleanly with the atyfb driver running the ATI card and the imsttfb running the TT128. If I explicitly use video=atyfb, however, I get a kernel oops as soon as it loads the atyfb driver. I've tried different (and no) vmode,cmode settings and it still oopses. If I change the output-device and boot with video=imsttfb and move my monitor over to the TT128 card, I get a successful boot, but in console mode every character is followed by a space, with the right half of the output running off the screen. On one occasion (I'm not sure what was different) instead of spaces, I got a solid white square, vertically offset by one-half line, separating each character. I have not successfully configured X on the TT128 at all. The most frustrating thing here is that two boots with the same options can produce different results -- it seems to `remember' previous configurations somehow... I also cannot find documentation that explains the interaction between the NVRAM variables and the Quik parameters; they cover the same things, like which kernel to boot and what device to find it on, so which has precedence? I can't find a pattern to it, except that the NVRAM variable seems to override the Quik default, but an explicitly typed Quik boot command seems to override the NVRAM one... Anyway, any help or even just pointers to documentation on this would be much appreciated. The docs I've found are very, very thin on explaining the Mac framebuffer stuff... and I'm not proficient at reading kernel module source. Regards, -- Pax vobiscum; pax cum omnibus. Thanasis Kinias tkinias at asu.edu Doctoral Student, Department of History Arizona State University Tempe, Arizona, U.S.A.
