Subject: YDL 2.1, ybin, atyfb and general impression
From: Michael O'Keefe (mokeefe@qualcomm.com)
Date: Mon Nov 12 2001 - 16:07:55 MST
G'day,
This is my first foray into PPC Linux after many years of x86 Linux
(started with 0.99pl15). Eventually, I'll get to my questions :) but
just bear (sp?) with me whilst I run through some background...
I took my wifes Tangerine iBook and installed YDL2.1 over the previous
weekend, and everything worked out fine. I did have Mandrake 8.0 on it,
but the sound didn't work, and one of the points was to have MP3 music
whilst I was on a business trip.
As I am accustomed to do, I tried to setup the partitioning the way
I wanted it, with various partition sizes, but the installer kept barfing
with the error message that I have seen reported here "error transaction
set. Please correct manually". Eventually I believe this has something to
do with amount of diskspace in /tmp, becoz the more space I gave to /,
the further it got into the installation. I've seen this before on x86 RPM
installations where it barfs when it tries to copy large RPM's to the disk
prior to installation, so I'm guessing this is what is happening. Problem
is, I didn't want /tmp (or /{var,home,usr}) on my / partition due to disk
space filling issues. My tendancy is to sylink /tmp to /var/tmp so that /
is left alone.
So anyway, after the 4th go, I decided to hell with it, I'll let / be the
rest of the disk, and just partition off /var and /home, but it seems the
installer only likes is when / is the first partition specified. If I'm
right on this, someone might wanna take a look at it, as it took me a couple
of goes to work this one out as well.
Anyway, I ended up doing a standard install, and then removing all the RPM's
I didn't want, since after 6 or more attempts at selecting the packages to
install, and then finding out later that there wasn't enuff disk space on
various partitions. Again, a common problem amongst RH-like installers is
that they partition before selecting packages, rather than the other way
around, and working out how much diskspace will be required so that the
installer can be notified when not partitioing appropriately.
Then I moved onto my next normal step of rebuilding my kernel with all the
extra goop stripped out and only support for the devices I want, and for
added good measure, making everything that can be a module, a module.
So I end up with a kernel (half size - that's what I like) but can't get ybin
to install it, since firstly, I had removed the hfsutils RPM, but ybin needed
them. That dependancy should have been added to the RPM DB. But still, after
adding it back, ybin still won't update the bootloader. It just sits there
quietly. Ctrl-C gets me back my shell prompt of course, but I must be missing
something in the kernel to get the job done becoz I have to reboot into the
default installation kernel and run ybin to get the new one to be installed.
Anyone have any idea what setup in the kernel this might be ?
Finally, I'm onto playing with the frame buffer. Since now I want to play
MPEG movies on the console, I DL'd the CVS of mplayer over the weekend,
and got it all running nicely to play MPEG movies, but the atyfb only seems
to run @ 800x600 resolution, with leaves a rather large black border around
the movies. So I wanted to drop down in resolutions to say 640x480, or even
lower so the movies were in something close to fullscreen. But everytime I
try something with fbset, I get the other well-noted problem of the LCD
looking like it's melting, and having to return to 800x600 to get it back
to life.
A little reading on-line seems to indicate that the iBook LCD might only be
capable of 1 resolution, and that MacOS pulled some tricks to get the 640x480
mode ? Does anyone know anything about this, and if I'm totally wrong, have
any setups for lower resolutions on the iBook LCD that have been shown to
work.
If you're reading this line, you've sat through some lengthy shit :)
Thanx
-- Michael O'Keefe | mokeefe@qualcomm.com_ Live on and Ride a '96 Honda CBR1000F| roxus@home.com / | I like less more or less less than |Work:+1 858 845 3514 / | more. UNIX-live it,love it,fork() it |Fax :+1 858 651 1999 /_p_| My views are MINE ALONE, blah, blah, |Home:+1 858 748 5432 \`O'| blah, yackety yack - don't come back |Fax :+1 858 _/_\|_,
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