Subject: Hopefully, a couple of straightforward questions...
From: johnw (johnw@techpointer.com)
Date: Mon May 01 2000 - 03:02:16 MDT
Hello.
My problem mainly concerns complilation and installation of XFree86 4.0
from the source
code, but I have a couple other issues as well.
I downloaded the recent (2 wks ago.) CS1.2 and Tasty Morsels ISO's from
SourceForge
and successfully burned them to CD.
I am on a Beige G3 300MHz with 384 Mb ram, 4 Mb video memory on an ATI
Rage Pro
card which supports simple video capture; there are a handful of
variants of Rage Pro, and
one of them is an "all-in-one" type card. It shipped standard with AV
Macs 2 yrs. ago.
Mac is at 9.0.4, and I'm using BootX 1.2b3.
I devoted an extra internal 18 Gig SCSI drive to the installation, and I
still have the default
5 Mb/Sec. SCSI card that ships standard.
I encountered no more than the expected amount of problems during the
installation from the
CS 1.2 CD. I partitioned the drive into 11 Gig Unix, 128 Meg swap, left
the 5 or 6 Apple drivers
at the front, and made the rest undeclared for eventual conversion to
HFS.
The hang-up here was the fact that a 3-finger reboot is required after
pdisk in order to write the
map, which is not in the YDL documentation. However, I found some
messages on your site
addressing this point, or would have otherwise not known what to do.
Thanks.
At this stage, everything was grand. Since this was my first look at
Linux at all, I was very
pleasantly surprised at the amount of refinement and the software
available.
The Mac OS would not deal with the SCSI disk at all at this stage; it
was completly unrecognized.
I went back and used pdisk to declare the "undeclared" partition as HFS
and rewrote
the map. It worked and did not trash the data on the Unix partition as
I feared it might. Back in the
Mac OS, when the system came up, it found the new HFS partition, said it
was unreadable and
asked to reformat it, which I did. Now I had the HFS partition on the
Mac Desktop.
I have a minor problem here in that the HFS partition is a one way
street in Linux. It is mounted to
the desktop by icon, but I can only read from it using the command line
or KDE graphical
interface. It is recognized as a file, and not a directory, but I can
probably figure this out. I would be
more specific, but I used a procedure from the RedHat manual to mount it
via Gnome, which I cannot
lay my hands on right at the moment. Essentially I used the graphical
interface to point the HFS
partition (/dev/sda9) to /mnt/mac.
Now the real problems start. Although one would think installing the
extra software from the
distribution CD Tasty Morsels would be a snap, I could find no
meaningful reference on how to
do it. I explored the yup command & rpm and could not see a clean way
to install the entire lot
of packages under Software. There is probably a lot of superfluous
stuff on a full Tasty Morsels
install, but as long as there are no conflicts created, I would rather
start with a full set of software
to see what is available and delete things I don't use as I go along.
Whenever I tried to install part of the software, I came up with
unresolved dependencies using the
rpm command. I am guessing that I should have force installed the whole
thing, and that the
dependencies would have cleared up once everything was on. Instead, I
skipped around through
the Software and installed it an order in which no dependency confilicts
arose. By skipping, I probably
only installed only 80% of the Software.
A good deal of the newly installed stuff is not working, giving messages
like "<application> has undefined
Ext. type", The pmud daemon is trying to initiate (checks for batteries
in powerbooks), and some daemon
relating to Net Based Conferencing is sending root an email every couple
of minutes that it can't
find the conference on the web?
To this point, the question is really just "How do I install Tasty
Morsels so I don't create a mess"?
Even though yup sounds pretty user-friendly, I can't get it to go and
have had to use rpm repeatedly.
Barring the constant and annoying emails to root, the system was stable,
did everything it used to do
before I tried to install Tasty Morsels; I had it up and down several
times with no problems other than
those mentioned. Frayed at the edges but fully functional with the base
software.
Here is where I try to build XFree86 4.0 from the source and end up
locked out of X.
By far, The Most Important application of Linux for me is to interface
with campus SGI computers
running GLX compatible applications. Even without GLX, I have been able
to run some
applications that default to the SGI X-library, with more or less
acceptable speed over a cable
modem. I think this means that the graphics calculations are being done
on the SGI's and sent
over the internet to my console. I should have great results if I can
even get my Mac to handle
graphics locally using OpenGL software simulation, regardless of the
hardware acceleration
issue at this point.
Most programs I am trying to use, however, will not default to SGI's
X-libs, and just quit when they
don't find GLX extensions on my end.
I looked around and came to the conclusion that to get GLX on my
machine, I would need to build
it from the source of XFree86 4.0. The little (Xinstall.sh -check)
script from the ftp sites reported no
binaries available for my machine configuration.
I am not set on doing this any particular way. I just want to get GLX
Installed On My Machine. There
is nothing special about XFree 4.0 if I can get the extensions going
under XFree 3.3.6. I downloaded
the 3 .tgz files for the source from an XFree86 FTP mirror (17 Mb, 11
Mb, 9 Mb) which contain
source code and makefiles in #1, fonts in #2, and hard documenation for
all of X-Windows in #3.
I created a directory (intended to be temp) at /root/xfree and opened up
the tarballs inside.
Everything from them went into /root/xfree/xc.
I was following the X11 R6.4 Installation Notes, and had a look at the
xc/config/cf/site.def file, which appeared
to not need any changes, since most of the variable were set to various
names starting with Default...
I assumed the YDL installation would have these variables defined
correctly. I did not use -BOOTSTRAPCFLAGS
or -DX_LOCALE since /usr/share/locale was full of files.
So from /root/xfree/xc I did make World >& world.log &
I watched most of the 1 hr. compile with tail -f world.log and
everything seemed to be going alright.
I noticed ppc or powerpc coming up alot in the directives, which I took
as a good sign.
Following the manual: make install >& install.log; and make install.man
>& man.log finished it up.
When I rebooted, the X Font Server would not come up, complaining about
not finding lib.so.1.
I did unzip the second .tgz, which does cause a complete rebuild of the
fonts, but I thought it
would be better to rebuild everything.
Here is XFree.0.log:
XFree86 Version 4.0 / X Window System
(protocol Version 11, revision 0, vendor release 6400)
Release Date: 8 March 2000
If the server is older than 6-12 months, or if your card is newer
than the above date, look for a newer version before reporting
problems. (see http://www.XFree86.Org/FAQ)
Operating System: Linux 2.2.15-2.9.0 ppc [ELF]
Module Loader present
(==) Log file: "/var/log/XFree86.0.log", Time: Sun Apr 30 21:57:34 2000
(==) Using config file: "/etc/X11/XF86Config"
Parse warning on line 79 of section Keyboard in file /etc/X11/XF86Config
Ignoring obsolete keyword "LeftAlt".
Parse error on line 79 of section Keyboard in file /etc/X11/XF86Config
"Meta" is not a valid keyword in this section.
(EE) Problem parsing the config file
(EE) Error from xf86HandleConfigFile()
Fatal server error:
no screens found
When reporting a problem related to a server crash, please send
the full server output, not just the last messages.
This can be found in the log file "/var/log/XFree86.0.log".
I don't know if I need to create some links, recompile with different
values entered into site.def,
or run a configurator of some kind. XConfigurator says its found a
broken link and asks to fix
it, but it doesn't make any difference.
The installation is still young enough that I would have no problem
doing a complete reinstall
from the CS1.2 base CD. And then installing Tasty Morsels correctly
(How?). And lastly
rebuilding XFree again, if I knew which details I must have messed up
along the way.
I read a news article that someone had gotten GLX via a Red Hat .rpm
package, but I could not
locate it. This might be much easier, if it exists.
Last thing is that I have never gotten the middle button simulation to
work on my one button mac
mouse. I have tried several variations of adb_buttons from the BootX
window, and the first and
third always work, but never the second. I am currently using
adb_buttons=113,115 which
supposedly map to "help" and "home".
The very last thing is my ATI card. The ATI website shows 3D Rage Pro
is hardware accelerated
for 2D drawing in XFree86 4.0, while the XFree86 website says only Rage
128 variants are
accelerated and that Rage Pro is not. Who knows!
I would greatly appreciate your help to get my system back on its feet
with GLX in place.
Thank you very much,
John W.
johnw@techpointer.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Mon May 01 2000 - 08:55:53 MDT