I have a Sony PCG-C1VN lying around as a side project for free time, and I want to run a modern Linux distribution on it in order to use it somewhat securely.
Just running Linux 5.x was not hard at all, I started with Gentoo because I knew it has support down to 486, so I gone and built myself a working tty-only installation. But struggled to move forward from there.
And then I’ve randomly discovered that my beloved Tumbleweed supports i586, which Transmeta Crusoe TM5600 is identified as (weirdly it was i686 in peoples uname -a around 2001, maybe it forgot some instruction sets since then, it’s been 20 years), and there is xf86-video-mach64 in repos.
Installation went fine in a VM, I installed sway and i3wm (remember, 128mb of RAM total) and tried to run sway on actual hardware. It just froze. Rebooted, tried startx (after fixing setuid). It failed, there was a line (rough quote, will get the exact log if needed, but it’s a pretty standard output I believe):
[EE] Failed to load ATI module: file not found
I’ve spent a lot of time digging forums and wikis, but I start to forget some old stuff from a month ago already, and most of the guides are written in like 2006. I also tried stuff that is written in Arch mach64-dri PKGBuild file (compiling Mesa 7.2.smth from source with some configuration), but it failed due to “Assembler complains: array/variable is already defined” stuff, and I am no developer. Tried to go inside that file, commented some lines out, got nothing good, reverted and ended my lunch brake to actually do my job.
So the question is, are there any ways to get dri/drm kernel modules for mach64 on OpenSuSE Tumbleweed, or are they not needed and something else is?
This is a misleading message, a non-error error, caused by attempting to load a non-installed xf86-video-ati DDX that would unlikely be appropriate for use even if it was installed and succeeded to load.
I would expect the xf86-video-r128 to be more likely appropriate for a Rage Mobility than xf86-video-mach64.
Given the multitude of requirements for SSE2 in modern software, I’d be surprised to find a Crusoe usable absent a custom compiled kernel and various other software, or a distro designed for antique PCs. I gave up trying to use TW on my Athlons over a year ago.
Package description tells that it depends on xf86-video-radeon, xf86-video-r128 and xf86-video-mach64 and loads the needed driver.
I thought so too at the very beginning with Gentoo, but ATI Rage Mobility M1 is indeed Mach64-based. Also when I installed xf86-video-ati with zypper it pulled xf86-video-mach64 as a dependency.
I am okay with setting up a custom kernel and already did it with Gentoo and Arch, I just want to run basic GUI (TTY is mostly fine for my intended use with this machine, but it is unable to fully populate its ultrawide 1024x480 screen). Most, if not all the time I am going to run stuff in terminal.
In the past there were other drivers for older GPUs and operating systems. These have been removed from the Mesa source tree and distribution. If anyone’s interested though, the code can be found in the git repo. The list includes: