[Novalug] Ubuntu on PPC

[Jason van Gumster]

"Mark A. Metz" <mametz at aol.com> wrote:

> Probably.  We'll keep squeezing until we get blood or lose patience. ; )
> 
> I guess I'm expecting to get slow desktop effects, not NO desktop
> effects.  Or for the UI to crash when desktop effects are enabled.  Then
> we'd know if was a performance issue.  It currently feels like something
> is missing in the setup.

I've been quietly following along, but it seems to me that either your
particular ATI video card doesn't have 3D acceleration (hard to believe) or
you haven't loaded the driver for your video card. A quick Google hunt indicates
that the card in your machine may be an ATI Rage 128 Pro. You can do a quick
lspci (assuming you have pciutils installed... if you don't, then 'apt-get
install pciutils') and know for sure what card you have ('lspci|grep VGA' should
get you there fastest).

Assuming that you do, in fact, have a Rage 128 and assuming that it was
properly detected, you should have the r128 video driver... and that's
normally loaded as a module. There are two places you should look to confirm.
First, see if the module is loaded ('lsmod|grep r128'). Also, check your
xorg.conf (/etc/X11/xorg.conf) in the "Device" section. The Driver property
should read "r128". You'll also probably want to look in the "Module" section
and confirm that 'Load "glx"' and 'Load "dri"' are in there.

Assuming all of that is correct, you can use glxinfo as elsewhere suggested
(after installing the mesa_utils package) to see if you have accelerated 3D
enabled.

Now, the last two paragraphs were written based on the assumption that you've
got a Rage 128 in your Powerbook. If lspci tells you otherwise, we'll at least
have a more clear starting point. If the results you get are not like I
described in the last two paragraphs, you can take steps to remedy that.
However, if all of that matches up and glxinfo tells you that you do have 3D
acceleration but Compiz gives you no dice... I'm at a loss.

  -Jason