Hello. I have Debian Sid (so, precursor to Debian 11) running on an old PowerMac (cpu size: 400MHz, clock: 99MHz, RAM: 1.792 gigs).

I use mplayer to play videos. It can only play low resolution videos, and even these are not displayed well. It often complains of "xv" being lacking. Here's some feedback on this issue:

I notice the following in the Xorg.0.log file:
The package xserver-xorg-video-r128 does not exist in Debian Sid (seems it's been discontinued). I tried porting it from source to Debian Sid, but this resulted in X not even starting. So, I'm not sure where to get this module.

Anyway, does anyone know how to get adapters for the X-Video Extension present? Or does anyone have any other ideas as to how I can improve video performance?

I think if you expect to keep that two decades plus old Rage working you will have to stick with older releases, such as Buster, if you need pure Debian, or AntiX, or other distro which caters to older hardware users.

Your best improvement for least effort or expense should be to get a Radeon 9xxx in AGP very cheap from eBay or a local scavenger or refurber of ancient hardware. Even these I see likely to lose support in the not too distant future. See e.g. https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1179387.

I think support for the Radeon DDX driver that supports older Radeons must be in maintenance mode by now. The upstream default is a newer technology DDX driver, Modesetting, which supports hardware only back to somewhere around 2007. Radeons older than HD 2000 are too old for it, while HD 2000 and newer are only available for PCIe AFAICT. The hardware-specific driver for the newest AMD GPUs has been Amdgpu for roughly 8 or 9 years. So, the Radeon driver can't be expected to acquire anything more than bug fixes, and no new features, e.g. no radeon.hdmimhz.

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Yeah. I tried installing the r128 driver from source. But it would not boot up. Odd that despite distributions like Debian shunning the r128 driver over the years, you certainly wouldn't know it from the xorg wiki, which claims there's no known limitations or technical difficulties.

The idea is to try to get the latest software on older machines, be it Debian, Void, Gentoo, Adelie, or one of the BSD distros. Debian 10 (Sid actually) works quite well on it. But yes, it may help to get another video card.

That document is dated June 2000!!!

I had a laptop with a Rage 128 GPU. It died >5 years ago. I think I have an R128 stashed somewhere, but it would be PCI, which is why it's not in a working PC; that and the dwindling supply of: 32bit distros, PCI slots and inclusion of a working r128 driver. :P

But it was feedback from their current xorg software that brought me to that site for "more information". But that's not important.

Do you have any tips on getting the xv adapters present?

The only one I can think of is to ask on one of the Xorg mailing lists or IRC devel or ATI whether such a thing has been subsumed by the evolution of Xorg itself, or whether the online docs are still valid. I've never been directly exposed to it. https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.5/d...man3/Xv.3.html that Google found me suggests it is very old, probably 10+ years. IIRC, X11R7.7 was the last version before referring to it as R-anything ceased when it equated to 1.12.x around 2013. Last major release, current, is 1.20.x.

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This probably isn't helpful, but: even in OS X for systems from 'near' that era (e.g. 10.4, 10.5, etc), the Rage 128 (which is an official Apple board and was QVL for that machine at one time) does not work great. Expecting to draw that forward into modern linux is a 'big ask.' I'd agree with finding an Apple AGP GeForce 2/3/4 or Radeon - do note that those systems often have proprietary AGP-alike slots and require a specific Apple card to be electrically compatible with their pinouts (you have been warned). The Radeon 9000 Pro would be what I'd go looking for, unless you luck out and can get a 9700 Mac Edition (as far as I know the G5-era 9600s are also not going to be compatible without some modifications, which is unfortunate as they're generally easier to find than the 9700s). I know the R300s work quite well in linux (I unintentionally tested this out a few days ago - they run XFCE just fine at least), but the 9000 Pro is an R200-series core, so it may be a bit different.

The comment here on modesetting is appreciated - it explains some wonky behavior I was running into with the aforesaid R300/400s above. Re: availability of AGP, there are AGP-based HD 3000 and 4000 cards (I think there are some low/mid-range 2000s as well), for example I have an AGP HD 4350, and know there were AGP editions of the HD 4670 and most of the 3000 series cards (including the 'big' HD 3800 series), but these are usually fairly rare. Loading one of these in the aforesaid Mac is another question altogether, however, because the Mac isn't 'quite' AGP. It uses a proprietary pinout on the slot (to support ADC) and requires OpenFirmware support in the card's BIOS. So even if you modify the card to plug in (which some people successfully did with GeForce cards ~20 years ago), I'm not sure A) it would work as expected due to the newer Radeon AGP cards relying on a 'bridge' chip (they're PCIe GPUs with an AGP-PCIe bridge called 'Rialto' also on the board), and B) the lack of OpenFirmware support in their BIOS. Would certainly be an interesting project to follow though...

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i strongly suggest you put old dogs to rest

* ubuntu hacks and damages old Intel video drivers to "not workin new desktops"

* ati was never bug free (not the 3D portion)

* it will take you longer to fix than you have - but the return on investment will be zero

* apple doesn't allow platform hacking it's platforms

* "XV" support was removed from X-Windows by ubuntu hackers in ? 2008 or so was it? you'd need to revert to XFree86 to even think about XV. but i'm not saying that xv will work on that card. (there were pay for play X acceleration drivers for xfree86 - they were never released to the public)

if it even works at all it's amazing

* i have regular 2014 USB mouse not compatible with windows 10. mouse works in linux. they deleted the drivers recently.

* i bought a 3yr old 100% intel iMac only to see 1 yr after I got it: "apple has an ARM-only manifesto"

really in 2020 your going to use an old power mac that was never supported by linux? really?

The Rage 128 is from the last millenium. The rest of the box is also, right?

I suggest you run a historic distro. Everything will work, but don't expect updates. On ftp servers like my local one ftp://ftp.heanet.ie you can download a distro from the early 2000s. For sure it will be lighter, but you can probably watch videos on it. Otherwise, if you have a few $$, forget it and buy a RazPi 4 with 4G or 8G which will run modern stuff faster on your monitor.

Spend $100 and get a machine from the last 10 years, with at least 2 cores, PCIe slots, ability to hold at least 4GB RAM, at least USB2, and is 64 bit. Then you can use it for something. And have it on the internet, with a modern kernel, all the security fixes.

You can get 3rd gen i5's on newegg for $140 /more/less with free shipping sometimes.

Anything before a dual core intel machine is deprecated for a modern linux install. And they are getting old. There is nothing that you can do to make a single core 400MHZ machine work well. Work maybe, but not well. And I mean with video, not just sitting there as file server.

Yup, enable frame dropping, reenecode to a lower bitrate, or use a smaller screen size. xrandr will tell you what's available.

Also mpv does a better job not stuttering, compared to mplayer.

When you get youtube vids stick to
Play it outside the browser. Gsteamer combined with scripts running in the browser will already have the CPU at 40%.

Every time I hear of an AGP video card still in use, I cringe.

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I should mention that I do have another more modern laptop. As a hobby I just like seeing what older stuff is capable of.

At one time the way to speed an old video card was to run it in vesa mode. Guess you can try it.

I think the only solution is to replace the card. Ironically while searching the internet for an answer, I found an old post I made a decade ago where I was also struggling with an ATI Rage 128 card.

Those who do not remember and learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

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