hello good day. i got a little powerbook g4 12 inch here witha 867 mhz g4 and a nvidia 4 420go (nice)

i've tried mintPPC and lubuntu remix and either it black screens after the installation or it black screens during boot of the live environment.

the lubuntu distro had 2 commands for both nvidia en amd cards but it appeared to not be working.

the os does seem to boot fine considering the dvd drive activity during the black screen for a while.

anyone got any tips when it comes to powerpc stuff? sadly alot of documentation is getting scarce

Sounds like the graphics is not getting the proper driver activated. Try booting it into text mode and see if that works without starting the gui. I don't know if you see the grub menu during boot but should be able to get it on screen by holding the shift key when you power on.
Once there then select "e" (for edit) for the kernel to be booted and add the number "3" to the end of the command line displayed. If that fails try again with the number "1". Then when you continue the boot it will stay in text and not graphics so the boot can finish and you should be able to troubleshoot this.

If the nvidia is the only graphics card then the driver that should load with the initial install is the nouveau driver. "lsmod | grep nouveau" should tell you if it loaded or not.

i did notice when using MINTPPC the terminal does work since the graphical instalation interface seems to be using that.

in terms of the lubuntu 14.02 remix not sure how to get into text mode.

it tries to boot into the live environment after either pressing enter or typing live in a text based boot loader?

Even when a boot into normal graphical mode appears to fail it is commonly possible to switch to a text terminal by keying in Ctrl-Alt-F[1-6], then fixing or at least troubleshooting the graphical problem from text mode.

For the kernel, the required driver for NVidia GPUs is nouveau. For X, there is an alternate option that became available many years ago named modesetting. It was eventually merged into the server package. Before the merge time it was provided by xserver-xorg-video-modesetting in debian-based distros. It might be that in these 32bit PPC versions of Mint and *buntu you have tried that the modesetting driver has not been installed but possibly should be at least tried instead of the nouveau X driver that is provided by xserver-xorg-video-nouveau. Both nouveau and modesetting X drivers depend on the very same nouveau kernel driver. If neither nouveau nor modesetting X drivers are available, satisfactory X performance will be impossible from an NVidia GPU for which no proprietary NVidia driver is available.

hm i see. so they changed how the mode gets selected?

anyhow. in case of lubuntu https://forums.macrumors.com/threads...dated.2204742/

that seems to be a 2019 build so maybe thats after they switched it?

the page does say to use these commands for specific gpus. which i've tried incase mine just wasn't listed

Nvidia Geforce 6600 & FX5200 use
Code:
'live video=TV-1:d video=offbff nosplash'

Nvidia Geforce 6800 use
Code:
'live video=TV-1:d video=TV-2:d video=offbff nosplash'

Radeon 9xxx cards use
Code:
'live radeon.agpmode=-1 radeon.modeset=1 video=offbff nosplash'


but sadly no change yet.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/fb/modedb.txt is the only place I've seen video= on kernel command line documented. Nowhere in that file is the string "off".

The only X driver I have found affected by video= is xf86-video-intel (upstream name, not kept by all distros, e.g. not Debian, not *buntu, not Fedora, not Mageia, etc.). Modesetting, amdgpu, radeon and nouveau X drivers are unaffected by it. I have not tested whether if affects the fbdev, mga or other X drivers intended for ancient GPUs. It is intended for framebuffer use, not X.

Remember that Apple specifically had the manufacturers (both hardware and software) create devices that were not intended to run anything but OSX so they could keep a lock on both hardware and software for their devices. There are some who have found ways around the lock-in created by apple, but you will have to find how they did it as it is not common.