Linux PPC64 for Power Mac G5 Quad

[kencu]

I saw your post there… it sounds like it boots then tries to initialize the window manager and desktop and something in your graphics system support is not displaying. you could probably switch to a text-mode console, eg ctl-alt-F2, to get terminal access to work with it.

I have high confidence the mailing list users will help you sort why your graphics is not displaying. That final part, bringing up the GUI, has the most variations of graphics cards, etc, and sometimes takes a bit of tweaking. Not absolutely every graphics card is supported by debian, but a large number are.

 

[mac57mac57]

Excellent, thanks @kencu. Being new to that list, I have no idea if this sort of email is normal, or outside of what is normally dealt with in this manner.

I will try the text mode console (I *thought* it was ALT-F1 to get to in, and ALT-F2 to dismiss it ... saw that on a YouTube about installing Debian 11 on a Quad).

So, thanks again. If I can get in via that, or Recovery mode, I will count that as a great start. If I can get in, the core of Debian is running, and from there, it *should* just be configuration issues, not "get an install running" issues - much easier to deal with!

 

[mac57mac57]

OK, I restarted it again and typed ALT-F1 after the final screen clear and sure enough, I got a text mode login prompt. I tried "startx", but it failed. I captured logs and sent them to the Debian mailing list. I am awaiting a response.

In the meantime, Debian has taken over an entire 2 TB spinner with ext4. @Doq, since you have this installed, do you have a way of accessing ext4, read/write, from Mac OS X (Sorbet) Leopard?

Else, do I have to reinstall Debian 12 PPC64 and select Manual partitioning, and partition a large chunk of the disk as hfsplus?

 

[Doq]

In the meantime, Debian has taken over an entire 2 TB spinner with ext4. @Doq, since you have this installed, do you have a way of accessing ext4, read/write, from Mac OS X (Sorbet) Leopard?

Else, do I have to reinstall Debian 12 PPC64 and select Manual partitioning, and partition a large chunk of the disk as hfsplus?

There is no support. You might be able to get read support with some build of MacFUSE, but writing is unlikely.

I do not see the point of a large HFS+ volume unless you plan on dual-booting on a single disk. If you want a "back-and-forth" volume, you're better off formatting it as FAT32. You do not normally want to mount an HFS-type volume in Linux for write access.

 

[mac57mac57]

Well, I have no idea why, but Debian will no longer install at all on my Quad. It had installed successfully, but was occupying an entire 2TB spinner. So, I reformatted that disk using Mac OS X Leopard Disk Utility, returning it to the state it was in when I first installed Debian, and then tried again. That was several tries ago. No matter what I do now, I cannot get Debian to "take" anymore.

The error messages are of no value at all. All I get is "An installation step has failed ... The failing step is: Select and Install Software. This occurs despite the fact that a mirror has been successfully accessed and used. I have tried two different mirrors with no change in outcome. Since I can never get the system to install and boot, I cannot get at the dmesg logs to see what happened.

Deciding that I could compensate for this after Debian was installed, I proceeded anyway, and the very next step, install GRUB, fails as well, and always fails now in fact, no matter what installer selections I make. I even tried the Expert Mode install, thinking that if I got more granular I might get more useful error messages, but I did not.

I have never used Debian, always hearing that it was incredibly difficult to get going, and I am starting to see why.

Adrian put out a new PPC64 installer yesterday, and I *may* try that, but at this point, I am thinking of giving up on Debian. I don't NEED Linux on my Quad, I just thought it would be technically interesting to have.

Next up, I think I will return to ArchPOWER and try that. The Debian installer seems hell-bent on using an entire disk, and I don't want to give up an entire 2 TB HDD for what will always be a secondary OS on this box - Sorbet Leopard will always be the primary OS. Hopefully ArchPOWER may not be so demanding.

I am rather disappointed. I would love to somehow split that 2 TB disk into two equal partitions and put Debian on one and share the other between Debian and Mac OS X via HFSPLUS. I did take a run at this via the Manual Partitioning approach, but since both software install and GRUB install fail no matter what I do, I can't tell why it didn't work.

Before anyone asks, no I did not inadvertantly fall back to my original installer. I *may* take one more shot at Debian using Adrian's latest installer, but if that fails, it is time to move on.

 

[kencu]

Sorry to hear about your frustrations.

Indeed, I have seen many people who try to do anything other than allow debian to have and control a whole physical drive run into trouble just like you. I always just give it the whole disk.

You did get it installed and running, I think on your first try with a proper install ISO. There is something going on with your Nvidia card that needs sorting out when getting graphics up. The mailing list users with Nvidia cards seemed to have some suggestions.

 

[mac57mac57]

Well almost @kencu, it was my second or third attempt, but the first with that installer.

I understand what you are saying and I tried to at least get back to where I had been by going back to scratch and giving Debian the whole disk again. No joy... "Select Software and Install" failed and then " GRUB Install" failed. I took numerous runs at it today... always the same result. The very thing that worked yesterday failed today. Very frustrating.

The issues with contemporary nVidia cards also confounds me. If this release is stated to support Power Mac G5s, shouldn't it support the graphics cards Apple shipped with Power Mac G5s? But apparently it does not! Also very frustrating.

So far, the only suggestion I have received from the mailing list (received it twice, once each from two different people) re the graphics issue is that I should disable a particular library... but dmesg showed that this library loaded successfully. Nonetheless, if I could EVER get back to the point where Debian was installed and booting, I would try it. I also got some great tips Googling the issue, but again, I can't get Debian installed, a prerequisite for trying them.

More informative error messages would make SUCH a difference too. The installer is failing, I have NO idea why, and it isn't saying. I find it hard to accept that this is the state of the installer of one of the oldest and most respected Linux releases out there. Very surprising.

 

[mac57mac57]

Progress and (limited) success at last.

Adrian, at the Debian 12 PPC64 email list, put out a new installer a day or two ago. As a last gasp with Debian 12 PPC64 before I moved on to another distro, I burned it to a DVD, held my breath, crossed my fingers and toes, and attempted an install. Long story short - it ran to completion successfully and booted to GRUB. When I selected the first Debian entry in the GRUB set of selections, it booted right up. Just like before, it stopped after screens of startup messages, but CTL-ALT-F1 (or CTL-ALT-F2, can't remember which one) brought up a login prompt.

Also as before, startx failed, but when I followed a suggestion I got from a member of the Debian PPC64 email list, it came up to X, as evidenced by the X-windows mouse cursor, but that was it. It stopped there. No desktop manager or desktop ever came up. Worse than that, there was no way to exit back to the command prompt. Eventually I had to physically power cycle the box to get control back.

During installation, I had selected KDE as my desktop, but there was no way I could find to start it up, and my desktop manager, sddm, didn't seem to display anything. When I manually started sddm, I arrived back at the X-Windows mouse cursor and no more. I had to power cycle the box again to regain control.

After a reboot, I manually installed the full XFCE4 set of packages and restarted once more. Once back, I issued the command "startxfce4" and off it went. After an incredibly long delay (I was sure it was stuck again), the familiar XFCE4 desktop popped up! Now, when I type "startx" it comes right up to XFCE4, and after its first run, it is a lot faster.

Two key problems to be solved for now:

1/ I can't get KDE to start. It claims that it cannot connect to the X-Server and stops, returning to the command prompt. I am using the command startplasma-x11 to get it going... found that by Googling around.

2/ The display runs at the right resolution, but the color depth seems wrong, almost as if it was running at 8 bit color instead of the 24 bit color my Quadro FX 4500 graphics card is capable of. I went looking for an xorg.conf file to manually adjust this, but apparently Debian doesn't use these anymore. Google tells me that it is all auto-configured these days. I need to find a way to adjust the color depth from whatever it is to 24 bit.

Still, this is good progress today.

Debian is still consuming an ENTIRE 2 TB spinner, but I have found a "prescription" online for shrinking its main partition while still retaining the file system integrity. With this I hope to return half of the disk to Sorbet Leopard. Alternately, and I haven't searched about this yet, if I could change the file system type "under its feet" from ext4 to HFS+, that would accomplish the same objective. I just want Sorbet to be able to use a chunk of that drive. Not all of my files fit on the current Sorbet boot partition - for now I am overflowing onto an external eSATA drive just to get enough space.

I would be very interested in any experience anyone reading this has with either (a) resizing primary Debian partitions or (b) changing their underlying file system from ext4 to something else.

 

[kencu]

Seems to me your expectations may not align with reality.

Nobody promises any particular graphics card will work, never mind what Apple shipped. Glad yours is working with a trivial amount of effort, though. Most work, thanks to smart folks.

I guess you didn’t see/read the other message about recompiling a kernel. Folks there have a lot of knowledge.

The most current high-requirement desktops like kde will almost certainly never work. The fact I steered you to XFCE was I hope helpful. It works great for most of us, certainly for me.

Asking for custom disk setups is fraught with trouble. I would leave it alone, or put in a smaller disk for debian. YMMV.

You’re up and running with a state of the art actively maintained debian setup with what looks to me to have been very minimal effort.

I will leave you to it from here on, and good luck to you.

You’re welcome!

 

[Doq]

I would be very interested in any experience anyone reading this has with either (a) resizing primary Debian partitions or (b) changing their underlying file system from ext4 to something else.

While it is possible technically to do this, you really don't want to do this. You should decide the volume layout before installing an operating system, as it's fairly long and arduous to resize a Linux volume (especially without graphical tools).

For best results, partition your drive in Apple's Disk Utility according to how many OSes you want before doing anything in Linux. It's far easier to delete a volume to create Linux partitions in than trying to resize it later.

Debian's installer disc should be able to handle it from there if you do manual partitioning (don't bother with any of the automatic stuff they are bung), elsewise you can try navigating through mac-fdisk to do manual partitioning.

 

[mac57mac57]

@kencu, please don't misunderstand. There is no shortage of gratitude for the help you have given me, so thank you.

However, I have always felt that it is only by pushing the "edges of the envelope" that progress occurs, and so I *always* push those edges, in all things. That is why I have an air cooled Quad now, for example.

XFCE4 is a great choice for desktop on an older system (and I have been using it as my primary desktop for Linux systems since 2005), but KDE will and does work just fine on a Quad. The Adelie Linux Live CD includes KDE, and it was reasonably responsive after the CD itself got the image up and running. Right now, on the Debian 12 PPC64 system that I am running, all of the KDE apps I have tried (Kate, the KDE partition manager, etc.) have all worked quite well.

I naturally tend towards lightweight, high efficiency software solutions and so XFCE4 is where I will likely stay, but if you don't push, you don't know how far it may take you. I hear that LXDE may be even faster... I will try that too.

Yes, I have high expectations, but those expectations would not be out of place for Mac OS X/macOS or for Windows. Why should we have lower expectations for Linux? Truthfully, I expect MORE from Linux, due to its nearly infinite configurability. I don't want Linux to be a "science project" - I want it to be a full fledged and fully competitive operating environment.

I like Linux, a LOT, so much so that I made it my "daily driver" for a year and a half back around 2005. Despite this however, I recognize that it is unnecessarily difficult for newcomers to install and run. Linux will never be truly mainstream until it gets smoother and easier to both install and run. Until then, it will remain largely an Enterprise, and possibly AI, server OS. Until then, my expectations may run ahead of the reality, but I will keep pushing the edges of the envelope.

I have been away from Linux for many years now. I expected the state of the art to have improved in those interviewing years. I am saddened to see that it has not.

 

[mac57mac57]

While it is possible technically to do this, you really don't want to do this

Thanks @Doq. The thing is, I actually *do* want to do this. I ran through the Debian 12 PPC64 installer so many times that I eventually got sick of doing it over and over. On more than one occasion, I did exactly as you suggested and set up the partitioning just the way I thought it should be. EVERY time I did this, the installer failed. I wasn't trying anything outlandish. I just set the size of the main Debian partition to 1 TB, and created one more (HFS+) partition out of the remaining terabyte. There is no easily explainable reason why this should not have worked, but it failed every time.

It seems, as I have said before, that the Debian installer is hell-bent on claiming an ENTIRE disk and nothing less. Perhaps you can eventually bludgeon it into installing with less than a whole disk, but I have neither the patience nor the time to make this happen.

It shouldn't be like this. Back in 2005, when I last worked extensively with Linux, I installed many a system on less than a whole disk, with the rest shared with one or more other OSs. Linux did it then - Arch Linux, Yoper and SuSE, primarily - why can't it do it now?

 

[Doq]

Have you tried doing the partitioning in the shell with mac-fdisk?

A while back I made a post about manual partitioning for installing Adelie Linux (since its partitioner was broken at the time).

It should be trivial to adapt this to an existing setup, replacing the instruction to create a new partition map with one to delete a partition, and go from there.

Once the partitions are made, you should be able to delegate each partition as desired in Debian installer's partition selection section ("here's /", "here's /boot", "here's swap")

 

[mac57mac57]

Thanks @Doq. I will look into mac-fdisk. Thanks for the pointer.

For now, Debian 12 PPC64 had the entire spinner to itself, and after two days now of configuring it, I am less and less inclined to mess with the partitions again. With help from the author of MintPPC, which is essentially a layer on top of Debian 12 PPC64, I was able to add the MintPPC repos to my Debian install and pick up both AbiWord and gnumeric.

I have also installed LXDE and an improved desktop manager. My system now boots to a graphical login screen from which I can pick my desktop and then go. Fabulous!

The only major "hole" I have left is a decent image editor. GIMP won't install and digiKam is not present. I need to do some digging and see what else is "out there" in the Linux world for image editing.

 

[Jeroen Diederen]

If you get a black screen and it won’t continue:
Boot the system in recovery mode and do the following:

mv /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libglamoregl.so /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libglamoregl.so.bak

 

[Jeroen Diederen]

The only major "hole" I have left is a decent image editor. GIMP won't install and digiKam is not present. I need to do some digging and see what else is "out there" in the Linux world for image editing.

GIMP is being built...fingers crossed! It will take hours I think.

Too bad, it gave an error....
The problem as I see it now is that GIMP fails to build with the newer gcc14. In Bookworm, gcc12 was used and compilation of GIMP worked with that compiler. I am trying some fix I found in the GIMP developer's page related to the particular error I get. For the interested nerds:

Making sure you're not a bot!

Again, no luck. I give up.

 

[Jeroen Diederen]

I added a hack in my repository to be able to install an older version of GIMP.
In your ppc64 system with MintPPC64 repo do the following:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gimp-data=2.10.38-2
sudo apt install gimp
sudo apt-mark hold gimp-data

This should pull in all the dependencies which are available.

How to install GIMP in MintPPC64 – MintPPC

 

[mac57mac57]

Thanks very much @Jeroen Diederen! I will give it a try and report results.

 

[mac57mac57]

I am pleased to report, @Jeroen Diederen, that GIMP 2.10 installed perfectly and runs well - thank you!!

 

[mac57mac57]

This will be the last post in this thread (well, from me anyway!).

The answer to my initial question "is there a PPC64 Linux release for a G5 Quad that just works?" turns out to be... yes, MintPPC64! Look up "MintPPC" on Google and visit the site for the complete story. The site is structured in a clean, straightforward way that makes it easy to navigate and use.

What is MINTPPC64? It is a value added layer on top of a Debian 12 PPC64 Linux base. The net result has the sweep and depth of a Debian core, topped with a customized, lightweight but incredibly powerful desktop environment, in this case, LXDE.

MintPPC64 also supports the XFCE4 and MATE desktop environments. There are others, but for G5s, one needs to stay to the lightweight side. LXDE seems to be the fastest of the three, and also the most attractive design and layout (IMHO) so I am using it. It is also the MintPPC64 default.

Does it "just work" on a G5 Quad? Yes! ... as long as your machine is equipped with a supported video card. So far, both nVidia cards I have tried (GeForce 6600 and Quadro FX 4500) work just fine. Neither ATI card I have tried works at all (Radeon X1900GT, Radeon X1950).

Note that both the legacy nVidia and legacy ATI video cards are supported by open source, non-proprietary drivers: "nouveau" for nVidia and "radeon" for ATI. Neither of these drivers comes anywhere near the performance of the original native drivers from nVidia and ATI, but both do a respectable job. The "nouveau" driver does a LOT better with the GeForce 6600 than with the higher spec'd Quadro FX 4500.

But does it "just work"? Well yes, as long as you have a supported video card AND Debian doesn't happen to be broken that day! ...the Debian PPC64 port is just that, an unofficial port. There is no "stable" branch, just an "unstable" one that changes under your feet (to a limited extent) when new module versions and bug fixes are released. If one of these updates fails, Debian itself (the base of MINTPPC64) may be broken for a time, until a fix is submitted

To accommodate this, the MintPPC64 web site has a banner across the top of the page that is either Green (Debian PPC64 is OK today) or Red (Debian has issues right now... wait for the banner to go green before installing).

Why do we care about the state of the Debian repository? Well, the Debian PPC64 installer is a "net installer". The install CD/DVD is only a few hundred meg of and by itself - it downloads everything else from the Debian and MintPPC64 repositories. Hence the current state of the Debian repository is critical. If something is broken there, the MintPPC64 install is broken.

All that having been said, if the MintPPC64 website's banner is green and you are using a supported video card, it will indeed "just work". It is remarkably fast on a G5 Quad, but a lot of that is due to the fact that I am using a lightweight desktop - no KDE here! MintPPC64 is up and running on my LCS-cooled Quad, and it installed in about 2.5 hours - this time will vary significantly based on the loading of the repository sites at the time of the install

In closing, I want to give a big shout out to Jeroen Diederen (@Jeroen Diederen) the author/maintainer of MINTPPC64. Jeroen is to be congratulated on a wonderful job. MintPPC64 is pretty slick! Jeroen is incredibly knowledgeable and incredibly helpful. You will be in good hands.

A word of caution to any Linux newcomers who may be reading this. Linux is not Windows or macOS. It is a LOT more "hands on", requiring lots of manual, largely command line, configuring/tinkering to get the best out of it. The learning curve is steep, but it is WELL with it. There are plenty of Linux users here on these forums to help you, and of course, Google (and increasingly, ChatGPT and its peers) is your friend.

Is there a PPC64 Linux that just works on a G5? Yes, and it's name is MintPPC64.

 

[Jeroen Diederen]

My name is Jeroen Diederen, not Diederon 😜

 

[mac57mac57]

My name is Jeroen Diederen, not Diederon 😜

Whoops! My bad! Corrected!

 

[Andrew-R]

The "nouveau" driver does a LOT better with the GeForce 6600 than with the higher spec'd Quadro FX 4500.

I wonder if you can reclock those cards manually?

GitHub - polhdez/nouveau-reclocking-guide: How to reclock nvidia cards at boot on Linux using nouveau.

How to reclock nvidia cards at boot on Linux using nouveau. - polhdez/nouveau-reclocking-guide

github.com

Usual warning, it may increase instability, because reclocking memory on modern GPU is, sadly, quite complex process in itself.

 

[Doq]

There are others, but for G5s, one needs to stay to the lightweight side.

Disagree. Plasma can be smashed out of a G5 pretty easily, especially higher-end G5s. My Adélie install is of the Plasma variety, even, and while I would recommend a lighter desktop on G3s and even G4s, you can easily get away with Plasma 5 or 6 without chugging on a G5.

Glad you could get a working Linux in the end, though!

 

[mac57mac57]

Good to know @Doq! Honestly, on my Quad, I can feel the difference between even LXDE and XFCE4, with XFCE4 being observably slower to launch apps. Nonetheless, I love KDE - I will try it out! Thanks!