Getting the external VGA of my Apple Powerbook (TiBook IV) working

If you've attended one of my presentations during the last 12 months, you will certainly have noticed the poor quality of the slides. Yes, the content and the presentation is poor, too - but I'm mostly referring to the optical quality.

I've already spent at least a whole day in the past in trying to get the external VGA working with Debian/ppc, with little success so far. I really don't care whether the external port mirrors the content of the display, or if it runs in dual head mode.

Today, I spent some three more hours in trail-and-error with the radeon driver of the dri-trunk XFree86. I tried CloneMode, Dual Head, with and without FBMode, and about any other parameter within XF86Config-4.

In the end it turned out that the man page was not up-to-date, and the preferred way to get it running was the so-called MergedFB mode. This wasn't as easy to configure as expected, and I still got lots of 'Signal 11' segfault-style crashes.

The crashes seem to be totally unrelated to my graphics setup. In fact, it crashes when eth0 is not configured yet, but works after the network device is up. Now please somebody step up and explain...