Re: How did you get X running in Debian PowerPC?

[John Labovitz <johnl@meer.net>]

Renaud Dreyer <rdreyer@math.berkeley.edu> said:

>    In general, how did the people with running Debian ppc boxes manage
> to get X up and running? I still can't get Xpmac to work, and if I
> switch to XF68_FBDev, there's no tool to generate a valid XF86Config file
> I could find. Since Debian PowerPC is about to get released very soon,
> I'm sure there must a solution somewhere that is planned. Thanks,

i installed debianppc without boot disks, but instead used linuxppc as
a base and did some very strange things to get it working.  but it
works now.

i used linuxppc's Xautoconfig to generate an initial XF86Config.  in
linuxppc, the idea is that you run this every time you boot, and you
*never* actually write your own XF86Config.  Xautoconfig looks at the
frame-buffer settings, keyboard & mouse settings, a few other magic
things, and generates a (hopefully) working XF86Config.

i decided not to run it at each boot, but just to use the resulting
file as a good starting point.

you can get Xautoconfig here:

    http://dev.linuxppc.org/~trini/

in order to get it to work correctly, i needed mouse and keyboard
configuration files.  these don't (i believe) come with debian, so i
borrowed linuxppc's versions, and just put them in /etc/sysconfig.
see the attachments below for what mine are (for a blue-and-white g3).

i also needed to patch Xautoconfig to use hard-coded font directories
rather than an X font server (which i don't use).  that patch is also
included here.

hope this helps you (and anyone else) out.

john

176c176,182
< "    FontPath   \"unix/:-1\"\n"
---
> "    FontPath	\"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/\"\n"
> "FontPath	\"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/:unscaled\"\n"
> "FontPath	\"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/:unscaled\"\n"
> "FontPath	\"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/\"\n"
> "FontPath	\"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo/\"\n"
> "FontPath	\"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/\"\n"
> "FontPath	\"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/\"\n"

MOUSETYPE="imps2"
XMOUSETYPE="IMPS/2"
FULLNAME="Universal Serial Bus 1 Button Mouse (USB)"
XEMU3=yes

KEYTABLE=
KEYBOARDTYPE="usb"