i have an eMac PowerPC 700Mhz with a builtin monitor. it's running Ubuntu GNU/Linux 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog), with xserver-xorg version 6.8.2-10 the text console (non-X11) works exactly as expected. the machine boots to display the text console on the builtin monitor. By default, the X.org xserver chooses the external monitor port rather than the builtin monitor. with the external monitor port, things work as expected, with 24-bit color, and whatever resolution the external monitor supports. In this default case, the builtin monitor goes completely blank. When i force the X.org xserver to use the builtin monitor (with Option "CrtcNumber" "1"), i can coax some form of graphics to the builtin display, but it seems to be getting things massively wrong. in particular: i think the computer feeds the video data to the card as whatever bitdepth you specify, but the card seems to be stuck only displaying 8bit video at 1024x768 resolution to the builtin monitor. That is, from a software point-of-view, everything seems to be working just fine, using higher bit-depths and resolutions, but the actual monitor is being fed with data as though it were all 8-bit, 1024x768. So, for example, if you specify 24bpp, you get the image smeared out along the screen both horizontally and vertically. Or if you specify a higher resolution, a similar effect happens. The monitor is only getting the data from the first (8*1024*768) bytes of the frame buffer, even though the display manager (or other X11 clients) are presented with a nice, high-res, high-bitdepth X11 environment. i've verified this by experimenting with a range of different bitdepths and resolutions. i'm happy to take photos of the screens or do any recompiling or debugging requested to help resolve this problem. Just let me know! i've actually got a lab full of these machines which i'd love to be able to run X.org on. (i'm also experiencing the same problem as reported in bug 3009 where i need to force HWCursor to "off" to get a mouse cursor to display on the builtin monitor. That tweak doesn't seem to be needed for proper cursor display on the external monitor, however.)
just did a little more experimentation, and i thought i'd add these notes: displaying via the external monitor port (CrtcNumber "0"), even at 8bpp looks way better than it looks through the builtin monitor (CrtcNumber "1"). i don't know enough about how 8bpp colormaps work (is it palettized?) to know why this is, but the external screen at least looks reasonable at 1024x768/8bpp. the internal monitor looks like it has randomly allocated colors to the different pixel values.
This bug is just rubbish after the disk crash. Closing!
Use of freedesktop.org services, including Bugzilla, is subject to our Code of Conduct. How we collect and use information is described in our Privacy Policy.