Attempts to install Linux in multi-boot on a 2004 12" Alubook

[Alubook133]

Thanxx my friend, pretty simple stuff or even trivial for many advanced dev's here, but cool indeed and satisfying to see it work as I want it to (except for the questionable color set provided by whiptail, which is adjustable nowadays but not at the time of 12.04, not sure about 16.04 - but it's got that prev century look at least ^^).

Speaking of which, would be nice if you can find the persistent usb iso because while I can still burn CD's on my Alubook from 2004, it's quite a PITA for me to create a DVD for any distro that requires it (and for some reason (subpar past experience) I'm always anxious when burning DVD's, always fear that it'll fail at some point) - but obviously don't waiste too much time on it since it _is_ doable for me.

Oh and btw yes you did include scrot in that remix, thanks a lot, looks quite powerful plus does not generate pesky error messages (the only thing with scrot is that, while I understand it's a shortcut for screenshot, the image of a certain part of our body inevitably comes to mind each time I type it )

 

[wicknix]

(the only thing with scrot is that, while I understand it's a shortcut for screenshot, the image of a certain part of our body inevitably comes to mind each time I type it )

🤣

Well, you dont need the persistent USB image if you just want to test 16.04 remix. You can write the .iso to usb and just boot it that way to mess with. It wont save any settings like the persistent usb iso would, but you can still run it live from USB just like it would run from DVD. I recommend writing the iso to usb using dd from within Linux as dd is wonky in OS X.

 

[Alubook133]

Ok but last time I tried to boot from an usb flash drive an iso prepared for disc install it didn't work, at some point the install script was visibly looking for stuff on *CD* i/o on the usb drive (though it did boot from there...).

Well, I'll give it a try nonetheless, though non persistency will also be problematic (dead battery), unless suspend-to-disk works with that distro (and my P'book).

Spoiler: Useless rant

Hmm... I seem to remember that a few months ago when I started this whole Alubook resurrection adventure I ran a piece of s/w on my Win11 machine that allowed to "burn" a pendrive with an ISO and allowed to select "persistent live" mode and choose the persistent partition size... was it Balena etcher, or some other similar app, not sure (and even less sure that I can boot the Powerbook with something prepared in Win11, never worked so far, only pendrives/CD's/DVDs burnt in some version of OS X have been bootable so far). Oh well, we shall see.

EDIT : found it, it's Rufus 4.5, only runs in Windows, for the sake of it I've used it to burn the only pendrive I have that the Alubook allows to boot from, and... the Rufus GUI does not offer persistent live option, so I'm guessing it all depends on the chosen ISO.

p.s. almost 3am here, watching the Superbowl is quite painful, I'm a long time Pats fan (lived there for a while and became a fan, Brady et all...) but love Mahomes genius and skills, however the Chiefs are in shamble right now it's unbelievable... :-/

 

[wicknix]

Don’t use Balena or Rufus. They are fine for Intel, but PPC is a different beast. Use dd from a Linux machine and the 16.04 remix iso will boot from USB.

 

[Alubook133]

Of course PPC is another type of platform but I thought brute copying blocks 1M by 1M to a media wasn't so CPU dependent, clearly was wrong since I finally went thru the recommended dd procedure, then rebooted to O.F., booted to ud:,\install\yaboot (would not boot with just "yaboot"), and... yep, booted to Lubuntu 16.04 LTS from usb.

Hou... neat icons in the taskbar... looks better than 12.04 from what I can tell, battery icon says "Battery fully charged 0% ^^) , did connect to my mini-PC via ethernet just like 12.04 was doing so it'll allow me to xfer iso's and dmg's and stuff from there, just had a funny error message from Gparted ("File system is bigger than its volume", I'd want to LOL at this one), oops error message from conky I'll have to edit the included conf file after installing, ah pesky desktop 2 is back but I know how to get rid of it, wifi found and now connected, browser choice just had a crash with FF an another w/ Spiderweb but not w/ Arctic Fox, well I'll look into this and the rest later, but bottomline so far is : seems to work fine (from usb, so it should only get better should I then install it on the SSD...).

 

[Alubook133]

A screenshot of Lubuntu-remix 16.04 still run as live from usb, noticed graphics refresh (windows) not always optimal, spiderweb quite slow to load pages when compared to 12.04 but I haven't applied any of the tricks used on 12.04 to speed up things a bit.

Pondering whether I will overwrite 12.04 w/ 16.04 or rather make space for 16.04 and keep 12.04 in case things aren't great even after install on SSD... anyhow I plan to install 16.04 and see how it goes, also because there's an update that could make it look even modern-er, while 12.04, good as it is (and I like it a lot), is "stuck" to older stuff.

P.S. Just tried the "Hibernate" thing, it looked like it was working (laptop screen then external monitor went black, then whole laptop stopped (and external keyboard lighting off) - however when I tried to wake the laptop up with wireless mouse then laptop keyboard nothing happened, so pressed the power button with fingers crossed but... got the reboot chime ! Sod. (as I explained before, hibernation capability is fairly key to me due to dead battery)

 

[wicknix]

If you like the speed/snappiness of 12.04 don’t bother with 16.04. The bloat of a bigger kernel, heavier gtk3, etc will be noticeable. Also i don’t even know if the Debian Sid repo “hack” still works. It’s been a few years now, and i’d assume current Sid repos are now too far removed from 16.04 that those packages will probably break things badly. You can try it, but i don’t think it’d go over too well.

If you really want new software, do a full Debian Sid or Fienix install. They aren’t nearly as easy to install, and usually need work-a-rounds at some point, but they are doable. IIRC i don’t think hibernation works with any newer PPC kernels. Pretty sure it was removed with kernel 4.x due to issues.

Cheers

 

[Alubook133]

I see... indeed, dragging windows around one can see the re-paint in action with multiple window corner drawn, and sometimes when closing a window a grey rectangle appear for a second before the screen is fully refreshed, doesn't bode well for the future since unless I'm wrong this has nothing to do with the fact that I run it live from an usb pendrive, should be exact same behavior once installed on SSD I think. :?

After reading your post I went off searching GTK3 and yeah many comments on "bloat" vs GTK2, or at least necessitating much more RAM and stuff. Then the uncertainty about your Debian Sid "hack"... maybe I should skip remix 16.04 then, as you suggest. 🤔

I've seen Fienix regularly mentioned on forums about PPC Macs, now may be the right time to give it a chance. As for Debian Sid, IIUC this is an unstable (by definition) distro, not sure I'd want to even try it (am surely wrong about this).

Fienix
OS Type: Linux
Parent Distribution: Debian
Architectures: PowerPC (32-bit, 32-bit SMP and 64-bit kernels)
Repository Type: APT
Package Type: .deb
Desktop Environment: MATE
User Interface: Fienix Customization Layer

I've found this blogspot about installing Fienix (btw you've posted there), is it a good starting point ? Also, in your opinion what would be the most recent version of Debian/Fienix that could run smoothly on my Alubook...?

 

[wicknix]

Yeah, that’s my little used as of late blog. Lol. I would skip those instructions. They are from 5 years ago. Fienix now has a bootable installer. Back then it didn’t. It was just an .img you dd’d to your drive, then you had to manually install a boot loader, or cheat like i did and install Debian, then add the fienix repos to add the customizations. I run Fienix on my G5. Install of the latest release was pretty painless.

 

[Alubook133]

lol, good so I'm right now d/l'ing the Fienix 6.0.1 PPC distro from here : https://fienixppc.blogspot.com/p/download.html, the 1st file in the list.

Interestingly the 3rd file is tagged as targeting "CFE and U-Boot advanced users who wish to copy Fienix onto a multi-partition disk with a preexisting boot partition, a Live Image with no boot partition is also available", hopefully this doesn't mean that the PPC iso does not support multi-boot ! (so far I've only encountered Linux distro's whose install offered custom partitioning and therefore multi-boot).

Pretty fast d/l btw... Because I'm stubborn I'll burn the iso on my fav' pendrive and try to boot from it, knowing that it won't work because the install script will equally stubbornly look for data on the DVD drive i/o the usb pendrive.😁

 

[wicknix]

The U-boot image is for Amiga x1000/x5000 users. The PPC image uses yaboot for a boot loader, same as Lubuntu. Just remember to use dd to copy to USB and it won’t complain.

 

[Alubook133]

Yep, and that's what I did right after reading on Casey Cullen's blogspot that usb boot/install was doable, and...

... it das does boot, however I get a warning and an error message, and then nothing. I'm sure I've read somewhere about these issues, but don't remember having read solutions for them, so I'll continue my research.

Just for reference, a picture of the boot screen with error message :

Spoiler: boot screen

 

[wicknix]

Ah. You are trying to boot with the default 64 bit kernel. Wont work on a G4. Use the 32 bit kernel in the boot options menu.

 

[Alubook133]

Duh ! One of these days I'll learn to READ whatever's on the screen i/o rushing to frustration status.
It does say "Elf 64 kernel loaded", as well as "For a full list of options, press Tab", pretty clear stuff, sorry for the unnecessary heads up.

But that had me realize this is not a live session thing, it's meant to directly install Fienix onto your machine, there's no trying first prior to install... so I went to (re)watch this Action Retro clip where Sean installs Fienix on a G5 iMac, at some point (around 5:10) the installer offers various ways to partition the disk, so while he lets the installer auto partition the entire disk I'd probably want to choose the first item "Guided partitioning", hopefully it'll allow me to pick non-used partitions/volumes on my SSD to install Fienix there. (and I see the partitioning is about the same as what I did for Adélie or Lubuntu, quite logical).

 

[Alubook133]

So... strangely enough, when I select the right installer things move along (incredible, right ?), I've let the installer go thru a few stages (just to see how it goes, no intention yet to complete the install, need to decide for further partitioning the SSD), I've had the "missing firmware" page unsurprisingly (but sadly) related to the B43 chip (Broadcom chip for Airport), then got to the "Partition disks" page.

The only disk listed in details (with existing partitions) is the... 8GB usb thumbdrive "disk" (sdb) from which I've booted this installer ^^, so as said above I selected "Guided partitioning", which provides 5 choices from which "Manual" returns to the previous screen, 3 choices start with "use entire disk" so nope I think, the first in the list "Guided - use the largest contiguous free space" is probably the one I'll want to choose, though not very confident about it (and therefore a bit nervous, not wanting to lose the 3 existing OS partitions).

Spoiler: Fienix partitioning

 

[NewbiePPC]

What I do is in the Leopard disk utility prepare a blank partition (shrink, create, delete), later in fienix using the guided partitioning choose use the largest contiguous free space

 

[Alubook133]

Pretty much what I did yesterday, booted in Sorbet and shrunk the "Documents" partition (largest one, e/o SSD) to make space for Fienix. Then I tried to reboot on the usb drive, only to find out that I could not, for the simple reason that while I was experimenting with the Fienix installer I must have chosen an item which did some writing on the usb drive itself therefore destroying the installer lol.

So I postponed the install to today, just wrote the Fienix installer again onto the pendrive. Now I'm still uncomfortable with the "Guided - use the largest contiguous free space", I suppose this means that the installer will create the required partitions into that space (split it in 3 partitions therefore), I understand it's very convenient for some but what I want to do is :

- /dev/sda2 for boot (same as for Lubuntu-remix, I saved its contents to re-use later if i come back to Lubuntu)
- /dev/sda7 for swap (again, same as Lubuntu, this is temp stuff so no soucy)
- /dev/sda11 for root, this is the section I created for Fienix

though not at all sure I can restore the /dev/sda2 partitions contents (yaboot and stuff) to recover Lubuntu-remix without reinstalling it entirely, oh well I'll eventually find out.

So I'd prefer that the Fienix installer leaves it 100% to the user to partition their disk as they wish, I thought the "Manual" option would do that but instead it just returns to the list of "Guided - etc etc...".

 

[Alubook133]

Well, this is not going anywhere, the installer refuses to offer to partition the main drive (SSD) and only allows me to install Fienix on the pendrive, as if the main drive was non-existent. 🤨
In fact when getting to the partitioner page I see that it prepares the usb pendrive for install (divides it in 3 partitions), so I just did an "Undo changes to partitions" and indeed the pendrive now shows its actual partitions.

I've now gone thru all menu items (including "largest contiguous free space" and even LVM) just to see if at some point the installer would realize there IS a main drive in my machine, but no, it totally ignores it, no /dev/sda nothing, iow maybe I'm missing s'thing but I can't install Fienix at this stage. 😒

Any suggestion welcome.

EDIT : unless... just got an idea, will reboot to Sorbet and run diskutil, let's see...

EDIT 2 : Sorbet partition/volume failing... done backup then running Repair disk, should end up Ok, after which I'll retry Fienix - ah yep, partition Ok now. 😌

 

[Alubook133]

And here's yet another reason to turn 🤪

Spoiler: Trying to create "free space" on OS X : no way.

Due to the unsuccessful Fienix install as related above, with the installer refusing access to the main drive for partitioning, I thought that maybe contrary to the Adélie or Lubuntu installers, the Fienix one absolutely REQUIRES to see "FREE space" on any drive attached to the machine, as hinted by the menu option title "largest contiguous free space".

So I went back to Sorbet, launched the Disk utility, and saw that the space I have freed yesterday was not actually considered as a "free space", in fact it was part of the overall volume containing the "Documents" partition, iow pretty much a chunk (38GB) of wasted space on the SSD (sounds ridiculous). And I thought "voilà ! this could explain why the Fienix installer doesn't see any "free" space on the SSD"...

So what do I do ? Well, I try to make sure these 38GB are in a separate volume - done, but for the life of me I can't find anywhere an explanation on how to transform that volume (/dev/disk0s11 with Apple_HFS format and named "Documents_2" by D.U.) into free space. I've tried "remove volume" in D.U., but it's been saying "preparing to remove volume" for a good 20 mns now. What gives ?? 😠

EDIT : I've tried this in the terminal : diskutil eraseVolume jhfs+ drive /dev/disk0s11 but it just renamed the partition to "drive", still no free space in sight...

Ok I'll try to do that in Lubuntu, probably have a better chance there...

 

[joevt]

I would try using iPartition.app 3.3.1 to partition the drive. It can create, move, and remove partitions. You may want to use the "sort partition map" option if the partitions are not ordered by start block.
https://coriolis-systems.com

 

[Alubook133]

@joevt, thanxx for the tip - however I've just succeeded in turning that 38GB partition into a free space volume using the Disk Utility - the Lubuntu one, not Leopard. I have a minor issue with the very first, tiny partition of 32kB that is said to be "misaligned by 3584 bytes" and a suggestion to "repartition", not sure how to do this.

So if Lubuntu, which is a Linux kernel distro, says that /dev/sda(11) is FREE space, hopefully Fienix, another Linux-based distro, will concur. Hmm... not convinced it'll fix the issue, but let's give it a go !

 

[Alubook133]

Well, I was right being perplexed by all this : despite having a good 38GB of free space on the SSD, the Fienix installer still totally ignores it and continues to only offer the usb thumbdrive as the sole target on the machine. What a PITA !

There's only one last thing to try I guess : burn the installer on a DVD i/o a flash drive. Which is another style of PITA in and of itself. Am I confident it'll fix the install ? Not in the least bit, looks like the installer simply ignores the SSD. But at least I won't get again and again the usb drive as sole possibility.

 

[Alubook133]

Sooooo......

I went off to the convoluted procedure here to burn a DVD with Fienix installer, went smoothly, put the DVD into the Alubook, started it, and... what ? No install32 item in the list ? WHY ? I know it is in the ISO, so what's going on ?

Ok well why not trying the default install script, although it's for the 64-bit version ? Tried it, and... it worked ! Probably the script for 32-bit renamed. Got the installer started, chose the language etc... until it got to the disk detection step.

And this is where my initial feeling got confirmed : the installer, although quite recent, is unable to detect the SSD ! Instead, it's offering me to either continue without any drive (wonder where this would go) or to pick a driver among a quite long list of them...

I suspect none of the offered drivers will be of any use, however I'll do a search and see if I can find a suitable one for my Kingston 256GB mSATA SSD.

Spoiler: Long story short : nah. :/

EDIT : Casey has a bug report page on his blog, I see a user "Silviu" with the same disk detection issue (and also with an SSD), Casey says this should not happen, a couple of suggestions made but no solution found apparently... :-/

EDIT 2 : dead for dead, while the installer was stopped at the disk undetected screen I inserted a 32GB usb 2.0 flash drive, reactivated disk detection, and... well, it's moving along, created the required partitions and now "Installing the base system". This will take forever if it only goes thru the end, but might tell me whether or not Fienix is for my laptop and if looking for a driver for the SSD is worth the effort.
Except... just remembered that the Alubook is not supposed to be able to run an OS from usb flash drive, so this should be pointless in theory. I like to challenge theories though. ^^ (install at 40% right now, not too bad)

EDIT 3 : after/despite 1 hour of stuffing files from the DVD into the flash drive seemingly going Ok, in the end got an error message stating that the "Select and install software" step failed (no other info). Then allowed me to re-try, which I did, though not much hope there. Weird... the installer proposed to install one of the b43 drivers, which I accepted obviously, just wondering why it didn't do so at first pass... heck, maybe it'll offer to install a driver for the SSD ! 😅

And... nope, could not install yaboot and therefore told me my system won't be bootable (while offering instructions on how to boot "manually"), like I expected. Yet I asked to finish the installation, let's see...

End of the story : unbootable flash drive, as expected. Need to fix the undetected SSD issue, if at all possible.

I've posted a message (same pseudo as here) on Casey's Fienix bug report page, let's hope I'll get some answer.

 

[Alubook133]

I have captured (video->picture) the last error messages displayed by the Fienix installer at the point where it sees the SSD drives and tries to set it up for partitioning but fails miserably, the last message bluntly saying :

"sda detected capacity change from 256GB to 0"

Clearly the SSD _is_ detected, however the installer claims that it has a bad structure, issues with blocks/sectors... as if it was wrongly formatted or something. Maybe I should re-scan it entirely in Lubuntu and see if it can be "fixed" (and if not, redo it within OS X). But then why don't the OS X or other Linux type installers have any problem with the same SSD ? What's Fienix expecting from it that it doesn't get ?

Anyway, hoping this info will help someone around here understand what's going on, and tell me if and how to workaround this issue. TIA ! 🤞

 

[Alubook133]

This is probably going to put an end to my quasi-monologue around Fienix PPC on my Alubook.
Together with this post on the Fienix blog :

Unfortunately I wasn't able to make the installer recognize/use any drive attached to this G5. I tested many drives, both mechanical and SSD, neither is recognized properly, whether it is blank or has a partition table. Here is an example of what I see in dmesg, and this is the case for all the drives I tried. The particular drive used in this case had a MBR partition table with an ext4 partition. https://i.postimg.cc/J7f5rH2Q/IMG-20241027-090851.jpg

So yeah, unfortunately it is very possible that a specific installer will not agree with your hardware, here the SSD+mSATA<->IDE combination (most likely the latter specifically, at least the model I have), which prevents installation of Fienix on my laptop.

From what I've read it's probably related to the kernel version included in the installer, in which case I don't know if it's possible to update/downgrade it and I certainly wouldn't know how to do it on a closed/frozen OS like Fienix.

Through these readings I've seen Void PPC mentioned multiple times, so that's going to be my next move, starting with the dedicated thread here. Will hopefully get me somewhere.