What have you done with a PowerPC today?

[MacMaverick855]

Has anyone ever successfully driven both a DVI and Apple Cinema/Studio Display (these came with the later G4s and G5s and are not the LED version, no iSight built in) in Linux? I am finding absolutely NO information on how to do this.

I have a G4 with a VGA and DVI monitor attached and extended desktop works. Throw an Apple Cinema/Studio into the mix and things go south.

In my troubleshooting I have found that the Linux systems I’ve tried, DO recognize that the Apple Display is connected but no picture appears on the screen. Whether it’s the Display Setting or Xorg.0.log showing the Apple Display is connected, there doesn’t seem to be a way to get the display to show the desktop.

Attempts to start up in Linux with both displays connected results in an unusable display on the DVI monitor and a black/blank screen on the Apple Cinema/Studio Display.

If Linux can see and recognize an Apple Cinema/Studio display is connected, why won’t it display the desktop?

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

Excuse me for writing may be offtopic. Planning to obtain "Canister" today (g4 MDD Dual 1GHz or FW800 Single 1GHz). Which is better in term of OS support & upgradeability? (I hope I'll find dual-CPU 1,42 daughtercard, is it compatible with FW800?). Not bothering about HDDs, this is something I can handle easily . Waiting for advises, got only 6 hours (work time currently).

 

[theMarble]

(I hope I'll find dual-CPU 1,42 daughtercard, is it compatible with FW800?)

The Dual 1.42 was originally in the FW800 revision.

Both are practically the same in terms of upgradability, however IIRC the FW400 model support OS 9 out of the box. FW800 needs the MacOS9Lives version (Correct me if I'm wrong here).

Depends, what are thinking of doing with it? Do you know what GPU each one has? If one of them has the lucrative GeForce 4 Ti4600, then I would get that one in a heartbeat. It's the fastest GPU that works on Classic Mac OS, and is still damn good on OS X (not sure about Leopard support).

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

Depends, what are thinking of doing with it? Do you know what GPU each one has?

Another PowerPC Exploration project . Want to look at beloved (by many people) OS9 . Don't know about videocards, sellers not provide full description. Not in my intention to squeeze every bit of calculating power from Canister . Linux installations (I just like it) . It's funny but prices are equal for both Macs. Second seller not responds ATM.

 

[Amethyst1]

If one of them has the lucrative GeForce 4 Ti4600, then I would get that one in a heartbeat. It's the fastest GPU that works on Classic Mac OS, and is still damn good on OS X (not sure about Leopard support).

It doesn't have Core Image support but still works in Leopard of course.

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

What about Radeon 9600 Pro & Radeon X800 XT?

 

[Amethyst1]

What about Radeon 9600 Pro & Radeon X800 XT?

Not supported in OS 9 at all.

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

Ti4600 is not something to be found easy here...

 

[Amethyst1]

Ti4600 is not something to be found easy here...

Finding a Ti4600 is generally not easy if you’re not ready to pay big bucks.

As for GPUs, a rule of thumb is “if it supports Core Image, it’s no good for OS 9” and vice versa.

 

[MacMaverick855]

@wicknix, @dextructor, @Dronecatcher, @Amethyst1, I’ll put the question to you as you are what I consider MacRumors gurus: Have you ever seen, heard or actually accomplished this yourself, driving two monitors off of a single GPU (in my case Radeon 9600XT) where one is an Apple Cinema or Studio display vintage 2005, not the LED/iSight displays?

What keeps a Linux distro that detects and recognizes that an Apple Display is attached from producing the desktop image on the Apple Display?

I have found no information so far, on a discussion relating to accomplishing this. Haven’t stopped looking though.

MacMaverick855

 

[Dronecatcher]

@MacMaverick855 Sorry, I can't help on that - I've always been a single monitor person

 

[Amethyst1]

Attempts to start up in Linux with both displays connected results in an unusable display on the DVI monitor and a black/blank screen on the Apple Cinema/Studio Display.

I've not been in that situation, but here goes: It's possible that Xorg tries to feed the Apple display a mode that is not its native resolution. As Apple displays don't have a built-in scaler, that causes them to stay black. We'd need Xorg's logs to see what exactly happens when just the Apple display and/or both displays are connected.

 

[MacMaverick855]

Appreciate the reply, wondered if maybe you’d come across similar issues on these forums. This is more of me wanting to push these “older” machines to the limits with Linux. Got a bad taste in my mouth with how quickly Apple abandons hardware that still works. Currently running Void on the G5 with a lot of bells and whistles from @wicknix.

The GPU can drive two monitors, I have two monitors so I want to use them, especially since OSX Sorbet will drive them both when I boot to it. It might not be (too much of) an issue if I could boot to a usable desktop in Void with both monitors connected but the screen is torn, pixelated, whatever when booting into Void with both monitors attached.

MM855

 

[MacMaverick855]

I've not been in that situation, but here goes: It's possible that Xorg tries to feed the Apple display a mode that is not its native resolution. As Apple displays don't have a built-in scaler, that causes them to stay black. We'd need Xorg's logs to see what exactly happens when just the Apple display and/or both displays are connected.

I can do that. I thought the same thing about native resolutions so I looked at displays in Mac OSX and it appeared to default to 1280x1024, this appears in Xorg.0.log when both monitors are connected. Close review of the log does show that the DVI monitor has ALL of the resolutions the monitor can handle and only 1280x1024 for the Apple display. X11 does try to apply a 60Hz frequency to the Apple display where in MacOS X the frequency is n/a.

So the “resolution” to the problem may be to establish a monitor.conf in xorg.conf.d specifically addressing the Apple Monitor. In Void’s case it’s VGA-0.

Running the Live Lubuntu 12.04 and looking at Xorg.0.log I found that X11, xorg refers to the monitors as both being DVI. (DVI-0 DVI connected monitor, DVI-1 Apple Monitor) And no, the Apple monitor was blank, but surprisingly the Lubuntu (DVI) screen was clean making research into Xorg.0.log much easier.

I’m not sure I want to implode MacRumors with the entire log, perhaps an attached file would be better. I’ll look into it.

Thanks for the feedback

MM855

 

[MacMaverick855]

OK, the attached file was generated by Starting up a G5, 4GB RAM, 2.0GHz, Radeon 9600XT Powerpc64 running Void with a MATE desktop. Two Monitors are connected: a 19" Hanns.G to the DVI port, An Apple Cinema Display (ACD) to the Apple Cinema Display port. The ACD is a 17" monitor.

The desktop I booted into, visible on the DVI monitor, allowed me to look at the Displays configuration panel. Switching from the default "mirror" displays, revealed that the OS saw and recognized the ACD. When I tried to APPLY the setting, the DVI monitor flashed to a "secondary" desktop (menu bar and desktop icons disappeared) labeled Apple Cinema Display and then the DVI monitor went black, and into standby mode. Rebooting was the only way to escape the situation.

I'll be interested in your thoughts.

MacMaverick855

 

[wicknix]

Sorry. No clue. I don't own any cinema displays, or drive 2 monitors at a time. My Linux G5 drives a 55" tv for its monitor. Don't really need a second display. ;-)

 

[B S Magnet]

In advance of a used laptop to arrive (to replace the failing logic board in my early 2011 A1278), it was as good a time as any to migrate data from a smaller SSD to a larger SSD I’d set aside for just this laptop (the old one, that is — now to live on with a newer, faster logic board).

I needed a readily available system to run Carbon Copy Cloner and saw my SL-PPC PowerBook G4 wasn’t really busy with anything, soooo…

UPDATE:

 

[Amethyst1]

OK, the attached file was generated by Starting up a G5, 4GB RAM, 2.0GHz, Radeon 9600XT Powerpc64 running Void with a MATE desktop. Two Monitors are connected: a 19" Hanns.G to the DVI port, An Apple Cinema Display (ACD) to the Apple Cinema Display port. The ACD is a 17" monitor.

As you say that a VGA and a DVI monitor work as extended desktop but two DVIs don’t (is that correct?) — ADC displays are DVI plus power and USB — it’s possible that the ADC port is only functioning as a VGA port on Linux/Xorg. This would still allow the Apple display to be identified etc. AFAIK, but wouldn't produce any image.

Do you have an ADC to DVI, ADC to VGA or DVI to ADC adapter?

 

[MacMaverick855]

Sorry. No clue. I don't own any cinema displays, or drive 2 monitors at a time. My Linux G5 drives a 55" tv for its monitor. Don't really need a second display. ;-)

Well, you’re no fun…kidding of course!

On yet another whim, I thought I’d see if I could get Void to display on just the Apple display. After messing about, I entered “nomodeset” on the linux line in the grub boot command, or whatever it’s called. It booted to a text screen I usually see disappear to an sddm login screen. So I logged in as root, entered “modprobe radeonfb”, and the screen had a perturbation and presented another command line so I entered sddm an BOOM! Void linux booted to the Apple display! Crisp, Clean and really responsive.

So what did I do next? I hot plugged the DVI monitor into the GPU card and nothing. The Displays configuration screen showed the Apple display as an unknown monitor and never did see the DVI monitor. Xorg.0.log showed that the monitor was being controlled by fbdev (I think) The display was called FBDEV(0) there were no references to a DVI nor a VGA type monitor.

I’ll try some more stuff but this is an update.

MM855

 

[Amethyst1]

On yet another whim, I thought I’d see if I could get Void to display on just the Apple display. After messing about, I entered “nomodeset” on the linux line in the grub boot command, or whatever it’s called. It booted to a text screen I usually see disappear to an sddm login screen. So I logged in as root, entered “modprobe radeonfb”, and the screen had a perturbation and presented another command line so I entered sddm an BOOM! Void linux booted to the Apple display! Crisp, Clean and really responsive.

Great, even though this invalidates my ADC being VGA only idea. Dang!

 

[MacMaverick855]

I thought it had promise. The Grub command line changes only brought up the Apple Display. The DVI monitor has a white screen and the Displays configuration setting panel doesn't see it.

I tried radeon.modeset=0 and that was a train wreck. So does "nomodeset" eliminate ALL of the possible video drivers, because that's what it looks like, leaving only fbdev to drive the monitors according to Xorg.0.log. And after doing some reading, nomodeset should only remove the video drivers from the mix until X starts. Then I guess X starts and looks for the correct driver to use, but that's not how it's behaving.

Finally, I have both amdgpu.conf and radeonfb.conf in my xorg.conf.d directory. Are these two fighting each other or supplementing each other?

Now I'm just rambling. I gotta think this through some more. Would there be a more appropriate command to enter other than "modprobe radeonfb"? This gets me to the point where I can start sddm and get a desktop, but what ISN'T activating then? What ever it is, it's still not letting the GPU drive two monitors. Like I said, rambling.

Well, thanks for the help. Did you ever see anything in the Xorg.0.log file that lends itself to explaining this situation?

And one more thing: At the top of the text log in screen and during the boot sequence, I get this message:

"kobject_add_internal failed for of-display with -EEXIT, don't try to register things with the same name in the same directory.
i2c i2c-3: i2c-powermac: modalias failure on /u3@0,f8000000/i2c@f8001000/cerea1@1c0"

I haven't researched this yet but the "of-display" caught my eye. It always appears regardless of whether I have one or both monitors connected, which is why it didn't seem to be a clue as to why I can't get the Apple and DVI monitors to display a desktop.

MM855

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

Guys, do I need to create a new topic about Canister (G4 MDD) or we can discuss some my silly questions here?
(Yes I've bought MDD, second seller with FW800 didn't respond ). Got some pictures. System don't have storage devices, CD (or DVD?) drive seems to be unoperational. Can I install FX5200 AGP from G5? (Or it'll burn something?)
What if I install 1Gb modules instead of 512Mb? What version of Apple hardware Test (Diagnostics) do I need? (...and so on...)

 

[theMarble]

Can I install FX5200 AGP from G5? (Or it'll burn something?)

Not 100% on this but; You can install OEM G5 video cards in a G4, but you have to tape over pins 3 & 11 on the AGP slot otherwise it would be fried.

What if I install 1Gb modules instead of 512Mb?

I highly doubt it would POST with 1GB DIMMs, 512MB is the max supported. So for a maxed out config, you would need 4x 512MB for 2GB total.

What version of Apple hardware Test (Diagnostics) do I need? (...and so on...)

According to Mactracker, you need AHT version 1.2.6 or 1.2.7.

 

[Doq]

I put OS 9 on the Bonus Book.

Now I have Two Of Them™.

No, these are not disk clones. I actually manually configured the Bonus Book (Littorio, left) to look like the Ti (Vittorio, right).

 

[wicknix]

It took almost a FULL day, but i got current Pale Moon 32.0.1 built on VoidPPC 32-bit. My poor 12" powerbook G4 spent 1122 minutes (18.7 hours!) to build it, but it was worth it. Their latest release has huge web compatabilty improvements (without the need of polyfill extensions) that now allow github to work again, discord web to work again, etc etc. I built it with official branding for myself, but i might zip up my source and message @xeno74 and have him rebuild with unofficial branding if he's up to it. I just can't justify putting this machine through that again. Lol.

Cheers