Mac PowerBook G4

[Bill Chatfield]

Thanks for the info Dan and Al.

Right, I'm interested in ppc32 from a hobbyist perspective. Red Hat/CentOS would be for production. The difference between running MacOS X and Linux on this machine is like night and day, with Linux being the "day". I think the effort to make things work on older hardware forces one to think more about efficiency versus waste, which is a good thing to consider.

I have a Fedora 17 PPC install disk. And now I know, by experimenting with Lubuntu PPC, which kernel parameters are required to get X to start up on my machine, so I can probably start with Fedora 17. But, it looks like I'll need to upgrade through to F20.


--------------------------------------------
On Fri, 10/3/14, Al Dunsmuir <al.dunsmuir at sympatico.ca> wrote:

 Subject: Re: Mac PowerBook G4
 To: ppc at lists.fedoraproject.org
 Cc: bill_chatfield at yahoo.com, "Dan Horák" <dan at danny.cz>
 Date: Friday, October 3, 2014, 6:05 AM
 
 On Friday, October 3, 2014, 5:02:10
 AM, Dan Horák wrote:
 > On Wed, 1 Oct 2014 12:36:17 -0700
 > Bill Chatfield <bill_chatfield at yahoo.com>
 wrote:
 
 >> OK don't dump on me please. :-) What is the best
 place to find
 >> instructions for how I would go about building an
 install CD for
 >> Fedora 20/21 for ppc32? I almost had Fedora 17 PPC
 working on it but
 >> I gave up because it wasn't really supported. I
 have run Debian
 >> Wheezy and Lubuntu 14.04 on this PowerBook G4
 machine, but I would
 >> really like to have it running Fedora. I'm an
 experience Linux admin
 >> and developer but I have never build a full
 distribution from source.
 >> I know you don't officially support this, but if
 you could give me
 >> some pointers about how I could go about it, I will
 go away and leave
 >> you alone. :-) Thanks.
 
 > for F-21 we dropped 32-bit completely, so it is out of
 scope. F-20 has
 > the 32-bit variant for (almost) all packages built, but
 as for creating
 > a working installation CD one needs working anaconda
 (the installer
 > application) and other tools, I'm very sceptical,
 because no-one tested
 > them whether they don't blow up in 32-bit mode. But you
 can look at the
 > pungi tool (creates the installation tree and media)
 and lorax
 > (called by pungi, creates the installer initrd/liveos
 images). Not sure
 > if it is worth the efforts. What might be doable is to
 transfer a
 > preinstalled F-20 root filesystem (eg. via mock chroot)
 to the G4 disk.
 
 For  right  now, I suspect that Bill will need to
 start with F16 (last
 ppc32 release with install) and update his userspace up
 through F20.
 
 I'm  still  planning  on  working 
 up a remix for ppc32 (and have been
 accumulating  a lot of hardware to test it on), but am
 first trying to
 focus  on  getting  up to speed on ppc64 (for
 Mac G5s). I'd especially
 like  to  the the Live CD/DVD builds running
 again, as that would make
 installs and testing of boot & graphics _much_ easier.
 My latest G5 is
 a 2.5GHz quad with 10GB of storage (bump to 16 in the mail).
 My intent
 is  to  use  this  and  the 
 other G5s as build machines for ppc64 and
 ppc32.
 
 I've  been  stalled  in my progress to
 packager status by a crazy work
 schedule  the  last  month (1 more week and
 that should settle a bit),
 and  my sponsor-to-be (masta) discovering he needs to
 progress himself
 before  he  can  be  a  sponsor.
 He's suggested that I get his sponsor
 (Peter Robinson) to sponsor me).
 
 Both  grub2  and  yaboot  are always
 built in 32-bit mode, and support
 booting  either  32-bit  or 
 64-bit  kernels.  There  are 
 differences
 required  in  the  boot  setup 
 installed  by Anaconda but most of the
 actual Anaconda code should be the same.
 
 The  F18/F19/F20  ppc64 install is not in good
 shape, so I expect that
 the same problems will persist when built for ppc32. The
 lorax utility
 was  missing  support to "bless" the boot files so
 that the Macs would
 recognize  them,  but  Eric  Larsson
 provided a patched F20 Alpha ISO.
 Anaconda  installs  grub2  as the first stage
 bootstrap, yaboot as the
 2nd  stage bootstrap, but the yaboot config is
 incomplete and requires
 manual fixup.
 
 The  F21 Alpha TC4 is not working AT ALL on my G5s. It
 appears to have
 a  totally  truncated grub2 setup (looks like
 intel), with NONE of the
 infratructure  required  to  boot  on
 Mac. I'm hoping that somehow the
 ppc64le grub2 setup accidently was used on the BE build, and
 that this
 can be corrected for the beta. I'll open BZs to track this
 if required
 - will ask on IRC what was expected, and if known issues.
 
 The ironic thing is that the RHEL7 ppc64 builds appear to
 have a fully
 functional  grub  +  yaboot setup.
 Unfortunately, RHEL7 ppc64 has gone
 POWER6+  only,  and  the kernel won't boot on
 a POWER5 box (such as my
 Mac G5s).
 
 Part  of  the  reason  I want to
 contribute to Fedora is to make it so
 that we can keep the ppc64 POWER5+, so that hobbyist types
 like myself
 can  continue to use vintage hardware. Anyone seriously
 using ppc64 in
 production  where  performance  counts 
 would be doing so in RHEL7 and
 Centos and get the boost from the new instructions.
 
 Al