This is far, far away from what I ususally post about, but I found very little on the web to help me, so here goes- hopefully, somebody else will need to do what I did and will find this useful. My Mum, lovely person that she is, does quite a bit of work for her church, all voluntary, proper Christian she is, by which I mean she actually paid attention to what Christ said and tries to live by it. As a result, she doesn’t have a lot of money (neither do I) and we came to a position where her PC broke down FUBAR-ly, and she didn’t have the money to fix it. Luckily, someone else in the congregation had a “computer” she could have… As it turned out, an ex-school-owned eMac5 (how he came to ‘own’ it she didn’t ask). Great. It gets on the internet… ah. She needs it to write down and print stuff for the church.
“Wh00ps!! Come help me! I can’t make it talk to the printer!”
So, it fell to me to make Mrs Wh00ps (Snr)’s computer talk to her printer.
Day 1. It turns out, the antiquated version of OSX this eMac uses cannot, by any means possible, talk to this fancy-schmancy, high-falutin’ HP all-in-one PHOTOSMART printer. No way, no-how. We decide, rather than pirate an edition of OSX (required OSX 4 or higher) we’d switch it to linux. I choose Ubuntu -partly because I use it at home and know it, partly because the UI is easy for n00bs- and
day 1.5 download Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) ppc (live cd and alternate).
day 2We install, after much caveats, and it doesn’t work. In fact, we have the ‘blank screen scenario’ as evidenced here. I bugger about all evening, but eventually give up.
Day2.5 I completely unneccesarily download ubuntu 6.06 and 8.04, the revisions referred to in the link above, ready to return to mum’s.
Day3 After much buggering about, Using Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper, and trying the xorg.conf files provided in here and here (latter link worked) I got Ubuntu to boot as far as the login screen…. However, after login a blank screen again, this time with a moving mouse pointer. Choosing ‘fall-back terminal’ allowed me to edit, and even run synaptic and update-manager but I still couldn’t boot a full desktop environment, upgrade, or install anything since the repos are gone.
Eventually, from desperation I re-installed 10.04, then booted again from the disk and chose “rescue-powerpc” from the boot prompt. It didn’t work, again, but this time when I got to the shell I had figured to
mkdir /mnt/hda3 mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/hda3
allowing me into the OS, and then I copied a modified version of this xorg.conf file, mixed with the xorg.conf the installation of Dapper produced.
# File copied-and-pasted by Wh00ps
#original from http://homepage.univie.ac.at/georg.koe/XF86Config/XF86Config-4.emac700nvidia.working
# **********************************************************************
# Refer to the XF86Config or xorg.conf man page for details about the format of
# this file.
# **********************************************************************
Section "Files"
RgbPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
# Multiple FontPath entries are allowed (they are concatenated together)
# By default, YDL 2.0 and later now use a font server independent of
# the X server to render fonts.
FontPath "unix/:7100" # local font server
# if the local font server has problems, we can fall back on these
FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc"
FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic"
FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/Type1"
FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo"
FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi"
FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/default/TrueType"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/default/Type1"
EndSection
Section "ServerFlags"
#DontZap # disable <Crtl><Alt><BS> (server abort)
AllowMouseOpenFail # allows the server to start up even if the mouse doesn't work
#DontZoom # disable <Crtl><Alt><KP_+>/<KP_-> (resolution switching)
EndSection
Section "Module"
Load "dbe" # Double-Buffering Extension
Load "v4l" # Video for Linux
Load "extmod"
Load "type1"
Load "freetype"
Load "glx" # 3D layer
EndSection
#***********************************************
#This was the section I had to edit, using the xorg.conf file the installation of Dapper produced.
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Generic Keyboard"
Driver "keyboard"
Option "CoreKeyboard"
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "gb"
Option "XkbOptions" "lv3:lwin_switch"
EndSection
#The original assumes a 'proper' Macintosh Keyboard
#*********************************************************
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection
#this is the important part as far as the display is concerned-
#eMacs and iMacs (ugh) have funny resolutions and refresh rates... once you boot into X this is what causes
#the blank screen. All this part is original.
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "monitor1"
VendorName "Apple"
ModelName "HiRes Display 1152x864"
HorizSync 30.0-112.0
VertRefresh 50.0-160.0
# emac
ModeLine "800x600" 112 800 816 824 840 600 616 624 640 -hsync -vsync
ModeLine "1152x864" 100 1152 1173 1269 1440 768 769 772 800 +vsync +vsync
ModeLine "1024x768" 100 1024 1108 1280 1408 768 768 780 796 +hsync +vsync
ModeLine "1280x960" 100 1280 1288 1392 1664 1024 1027 1030 1064
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "device1"
VendorName "nVidia Corporation"
BoardName "NVIDIA GeForce2 DDR (generic)"
Driver "nv"
BusID "PCI:0:16:0"
# Option "useFBDev"
Option "DPMS"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "screen1"
Device "device1"
Monitor "monitor1"
DefaultColorDepth 16
Subsection "Display"
Depth 8
Modes "default"
EndSubsection
Subsection "Display"
Depth 15
Modes "1024x768"
EndSubsection
Subsection "Display"
Depth 16
Modes "1024x768"
EndSubsection
Subsection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "default"
EndSubsection
EndSection
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "layout1"
InputDevice "Generic Keyboard" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice "Configured Mouse" "CorePointer"
Screen "screen1"
EndSection
And then I copied it from the cdrom to /etc/X11 using
cp /cdrom/xorg.conf /mnt/hda3/etc/X11/xorg.conf
Oh, forgot to say, I had to burn that motherfucker of a 11kb file onto a cd to get it into the Mac, although if you want to mess around some more you can bother with mounting a flash drive. And bingo! one reboot and we’re in. Download linux drivers for the printer (and a bit of terminal work to get them going) and finally, We Have Printing!
