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I'm having fun getting Ubuntu going on an old PowerPC G4 iMac with integrated nVidia grahics - Geforce 2 MX / NV11.

(Fun of course is the goal, as the likelihood of this old system being useful is quite low, but hey.)

I successfully installed Ubuntu using the mini-ISO installation method, and opted for the Xubuntu desktop, as I've had success with Xfce on Intel PCs with NV10-series video hardware. (Not with nouveau, but with nVidia's old proprietary drivers which obviously aren't available for PPC.)

I am able to log in to a shell with the yaboot arguments Linux nomodeset single as recommended by numerous FAQs out there. If I don't put nomodeset in the argument, I get the psychedelic lava-lamp color-cycling-of-doom crashout.

dmesg tells me that nouveau crashes out during boot (after looping 103 times):

nouveau E[ DRM] GPU lockup - switching to software fbcon

My questions:

1) I know that the hardware should be OK for Xfce based on my PC-world experiences with Xubuntu and NV10-series hardware. Is is possible to finagle/tweak nouveau to 'work' with my NV11 chipset and Xfce? (Most online guides say 'no, just use nv, and I never had luck on PC getting Nouveau going on NV10 hardware without significant display issues)

2) If nouveau cannot be made to work, can the nv driver be successfully compiled and used on 14.04 with Xfce?

3) Should I stop wasting time and simply downgrade to Ubuntu 12.04? Many sources claim that this works 'best' out of the box, and nv can be made to work under this O/S.

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I have an iMac G4 with a clock frequency of 1 GHz and the same graphics card. Currently my mum is using it, running Debian 7.7 (stable). In the past I experimented a lot with the computer, having tried Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and even YellowDog Linux. Debian was the least trouble, especially more recently, where PPC support is declining everywhere. I don't think I had to do anything special to get the graphics running.

Anyway as far as I know nouveau is much better than the nv driver. Did you confuse "nv" with "nvidia", the proprietary driver? I don't think that can be made to run under PPC, since it contains/ depends upon a "binary blob" for x86.

After all Ubuntu is based on Debian, so both largely use the same configuration tools.

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  • No mistake. The PowerPC web resources all cite 'nv' as the driver to go to if Nouveau can't be made to work - up to Ubuntu 12.04. That being said, I've never been able to get nouveau to work nicely with NV10 / NV11 hardware on x86 - I put Xubuntu on those PCs with the nvidia proprietary driver and had good success. Jan 6, 2015 at 17:38
  • What desktop environment are you running on your G4 by the way? Jan 6, 2015 at 17:47
  • There were various problems up to 2010, like fonts being "chipped", or the backlight not turning off - but these all got fixed. Now I see my Mac actually had a GeForce 4 MX, NV17... so that could make a big difference, sorry! I used various desktops on the Mac (1.5 GByte RAM), from WindowMaker to KDE 4... but now it's simply Xfce.
    – Vlado
    Jan 6, 2015 at 22:16
  • Well, Debian 7.7 behaves 100% identically to Ubuntu 14.04 (no surprise, really) - the only way the system can boot is with 'nomodeset' Jan 7, 2015 at 2:59
  • Yes, KMS was one of the big advantages of Nouveau... the other being transparent terminals, which I really like. But apart from that nv used to work ok for me. I once had a GeForce 2 MX for PC, which probably led me to confuse my iMac's graphics with yours. Nouveau developers still care about NV10 & NV11: I easily found two bug reports... maybe you'll be lucky with a new driver version soon? According to the first report 1.0.11 (in Debian unstable) fixed some issues.
    – Vlado
    Jan 7, 2015 at 20:22
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Answering myself just for historical reasons. I no longer have this hardware.

I ended up just downgrading to Xubuntu 12.04 and using nv - under this configuration the system worked fairly well - good enough to be Freecycled to a a new home (where the person just ended up reinstalling Mac OS)

There just was no way that I could find to make nouveau work properly with that particular NV10 chipset.

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