Hello,

> > I guess not too many people were able to use XFree at all
> 
> It's such a complete and utter PITA to configure. 
Hmm, I just ran xf86config, then startx and got the infamous cannot mmap 0xa0000 bug.

> I spent several hours
> of trial-and-error-crashing-my-powerbook trying to find the right
> settings. 
Weird. For me setting it up wasn't different from setting it up on i386. Well, it didn't work, but that wasn't the config's fault.

> Xmacppc just works.  Maybe I'm spoiled by platforms where the X
> server knows about the hardware and figures out the right settings.
Sure, Xmacppc doesn't do anything on the hardware - it just uses whatever OF configured and lives in the frame buffer.

> XFree86 seems to know about the hardware, but requires you to dig through
> the code and developer documentation to figure out how to tell it what it
> already knows.
Not really anymore. It's broken for most things ppc but that's unrelated to the config stuff.

> Yeah, I did try XFree86 -config and it bombed like everything else.
Never tried this. I think most of the problems are caused by the non-functional vgahw module.

> That said, I did finally get it working on my PowerBook G3 (FireWire)
> which has a Rage 128 M2, and it's been fairly happy.
Ok, change my statement below from 'Radeon' to 'most ATi cards'.

> > Maybe most people either have a Radeon or are happy with Xmacppc.
> 
> Xmacppc is *much* easier to set up (about 2 seconds to relink
> /usr/X11R6/bin/X to it vs. hours of trial-and-error-and-google for XFree86).
Yeah, there's simply nothing to set up. But the price is no acceleration and you're stuck with 8 bit colour.

have fun
Michael