Video problems with ATI 7500 on PowerMac 3.1

I was having this same issue with my PowerMac3,1 . . . after upgrading the video card to a Radeon ATI 7500 my install of possibly U-MATE 16.04 would only boot to black, after going to splash and cursor . . . tried all kinds of boot params . . . . Then I found this thread, tried these, again failed, but I had a DVD with U-MATE 17.04 Zesty PPC burned, so I booted to that, added the boot params . . . and, into a working GUI!!!

So I went for the install, and selected the "upgrade 16.04 to 17.04" option . . . a number of crashes were happening, "webkit" crashed a few times during the slow install process . . . and it "finished" but adding that "a few packages could not be installed, so when you reboot you can add them manually" . . . . So I shut down.

On cold boot I selected "L" from Yaboot, and yea!!! we get the splash, the cursor, the log in window, we log in, the desktop image loads . . . and the display goes to black?????? In the good olde days of PPC linux, if you used boot params to boot a live image, those were added to yaboot **automatically** . . . those days of yore are gone I guess. I rebooted and this time again added the boot params listed above, and yes . . . a working desktop with all of my files from 16.04 . . . not too many, but there.

Rifling through the system freshly installed . . . hmm . . . no Firefox . . . hmm . . . opened the console, ran "sudo apt install firefox" . . . "no package found" . . . ??? While I was there I tried to run another apt update/dist-upgrade . . . a bunch of "404 errors" showed up . . . and something like, "so many broken links, it's not safe to run an upgrade like this . . . " Tried to install synaptic via console, something basic . . . a number of packages showed up to be installed, I clicked "y" and that again errored out.

So, I can boot to the Zesty system, but whatever it was when I downloaded it . . . that's what it is . . . you could try to get Zesty Ubuntu-MATE and those boot params would possibly work, but PPC is "no longer supported" by ubuntu, "Software Boutique" loaded a blank white window . . . . I guess I could try for a basic browser, but really the system isn't viable for web interfacing and/or keeping itself upgraded . . . . Not sure who is offering the 32 bit PPC linux system these days?? Don't think any of them are "fresh" . . . or have a browser that can navi the present web pages???? PPC is dead, long live PPC machines . . . .

e.e.p