Lubuntu 16.04 Remix (updated)

[RogerWilco6502]

So Im trying to dual boot this with Leopard. Are there any specific steps I need to take when partitioning? So far I've shrunk the OS X partition, made a swap partition, and made a partition for /.

From reading the guide, all that I need now is a NewWorld Boot partition. Is this correct?

 

[Hughmac]

So Im trying to dual boot this with Leopard. Are there any specific steps I need to take when partitioning? So far I've shrunk the OS X partition, made a swap partition, and made a partition for /.

From reading the guide, all that I need now is a NewWorld Boot partition. Is this correct?

What I did was to shrink the OS X partition and leave the resulting space as totally free.
The Lubuntu installer deals with the re-partitioning quite happily so long as you elect to 'install alongside OSX'.

Cheers 🙂

Hugh

 

[RogerWilco6502]

What I did was to shrink the OS X partition and leave the resulting space as totally free.
The Lubuntu installer deals with the re-partitioning quite happily so long as you elect to 'install alongside OSX'.

Cheers 🙂

Hugh

So the "install alongside OS X" option will only appear if you partition the disk yourself?

 

[Hughmac]

So the "install alongside OS X" option will only appear if you partition the disk yourself?

All you need to do is reduce the size of your Leopard partition, leaving enough free (unformatted) space for Lubuntu to automatically assign as /, home and swap as it sees fit. It also sets up yaboot which will give you a textual boot chooser on startup.
You still have the Apple boot screen available if needed when you hold the Option (Alt) key down at the bong, but yaboot works well and should be used by default.

I found this the easiest in my case because I still struggle with Linux on PPC, even though I've been dipping in and out since Redhat at the turn of the century 😉

I would also recommend a complete backup of Leopard onto an external firewire drive if possible, using Carbon Copy Cloner, or at the very least a Time Machine backup to an external USB drive.

However nothing has ever gone wrong for me installing Linux alongside OS X 😉

Cheers 🙂

Hugh

 

[RogerWilco6502]

All you need to do is reduce the size of your Leopard partition, leaving enough free (unformatted) space for Lubuntu to automatically assign as /, home and swap as it sees fit. It also sets up yaboot which will give you a textual boot chooser on startup.
You still have the Apple boot screen available if needed when you hold the Option (Alt) key down at the bong, but yaboot works well and should be used by default.

I found this the easiest in my case because I still struggle with Linux on PPC, even though I've been dipping in and out since Redhat at the turn of the century 😉

I would also recommend a complete backup of Leopard onto an external firewire drive if possible, using Carbon Copy Cloner, or at the very least a Time Machine backup to an external USB drive.

However nothing has ever gone wrong for me installing Linux alongside OS X 😉

Cheers 🙂

Hugh

Ok, thanks! I’ll give it a try 🙂

 

[tony359]

Hi all,

I am attempting to install Lubuntu Remix on my PowerMac Dual G5. Installation went well but when I booted up afterwards I had a "Loading second stage bootstrap" and then an Apple "question mark" in the middle of the screen.

I had previously installed the official 16.04 version and I was having a similar issue, only it was rebooting every time.

I believe it has to do with Yaboot configuration - I tried something with the official version but that did not work. Could someone please point me to the right direction?

Thank you!

 

[wicknix]

Make sure the hard drive you are installing to is in the "upper" drive bay. For some reason Linux doesn't like to boot from the lower bay. You may need to reinstall after switching the drive bay as the drive letters will have changed and may confuse yaboot.

Cheers

 

[tony359]

Interesting. It is indeed in the lower bay! I shall do! Thanks!

Edit: switched position and it worked! (at second boot for some reasons!) Thank you!!

 

[Hughmac]

Has anyone had any success booting the 12.04 CD on a Pismo with G4 550MHz?
I can hear CD activity but the yaboot screen is dead so I can't input any variables for Rage 128.

Cheers 🙂

Hugh

It was the DVD drive not reading the disc - I've swapped it for another drive and now 12.04 boots fine.

However, using the yaboot parameters 'live video=aty128fb:1024x768-16 video=offb😱ff nosplash' it won't get to the desktop.
How do I get a verbose output so I can see the errors please?

Cheers 🙂

Hugh

 

[wicknix]

Unfortunately the rage128 gfx cards are fickle under linux. You could try, once you think its fully booted, using fn+ctrl+alt+F1 to drop back to the boot console. Maybe you'll see something there. Otherwise i haven't a clue. 🙁

On another note, since i was off work today, i cleaned up 12.04-v2, and made v3 with a few improvements. First the installer was tweaked to display arcticfox and spidermail in the slideshow vs chrome and sylpheed. I also rebuilt a few packages to newer, or current versions, such as screen, xournal, irssi, putty, transmission, uget, etc. I left pretty much anything not internet related alone, except ffmpeg/mplayer/mencoder to keep it light and period correct. I'll upload later after more testing.
Edit: v3 download link updated on 1st post.

Screen shot of edited installer.

Cheers

 

[repairedCheese]

Well, here's something fairly wild I stumbled upon. I enabled gpu acceleration on InterWeb, and yes, everything ended up revered color, only now YouTube looks fine.

And not only does it look fine, but my 2.0ghz Dual Processor G5 is able to power through 720p just fine. Even in full screen.

Yes, it does struggle a little with 1080p but this is worlds better than any direct browser YouTube playback I've experienced on this hardware. So if it didn't have the color issues, it would be effectively perfect.

 

[wicknix]

Nice! On 12 or 16 remix? 12 smokes anything non OSX (not including morphos) that i've tried on my dual 2ghz. I can stream 720p twitch no problem on it, so 720p youtube doesn't really surprise me either. I hadn't tried as i always use viewtube in case i like the video i can download it (and it has proper colors). I hope to some day find the code that needs tweaking to fix the endianness color issue in my UXP based browsers.

Cheers

 

[repairedCheese]

16 Remix. Honestly, I only discovered it by accident, I activated gpu acceleration in about:config, saw that all the colors were flipped, and before I could fix it, I'd clicked on the YouTube tab I had open. And that's the only thing currently with the proper colors.

And it's absolutely watchable in high def, even if that is just 720p. Playback is smooth enough that it can figure that out automatically. So if the endianess can be fixed, that would pretty much answer the question "Can PPC Macs be used in 2020?" with a resounding yes, at least as long as you're using a G5.

 

[wicknix]

Have you tried with Arctic Fox yet? It doesn't have those endianness issues. I'd be interested to know how it does by itself without plugins.

Cheers

 

[repairedCheese]

Funny enough, Arctic Fox actually runs significantly worse. It also has less options, 720p and 360p only, and can't figure out what to do with a lot of frame skipping. I honestly don't know why it plays back so much worse. I enabled gpu acceleration but there doesn't seem to be a change in performance, while there definitely was with InterWeb.

 

[wicknix]

Right on. I didn't expect much. It's backend is quite old by todays standards. Media isn't it's strong point. Thanks for testing.
However, you can use these with any mozilla based browser.
Install this: https://github.com/janekptacijaraba...1.4Fork/greasemonkey-3.31.4-pm_forkBranch.xpi
Then install this: http://sebaro.pro/viewtube/files/viewtube.xpi
or this: http://sebaro.pro/viewtube/files/viewtube.user.js
Go in to browser addons and enable vlc plugin. (i believe i included it in 16remix, if not apt install browser-plugin-vlc)
Now visit youtube. The player window will overlap youtubes window. Click the hamburger menu in the center of the viewtube player, select embed video with embed, play as/with vlc, definition high def, container mp4, autoplay on.
Enjoy 720p via browser-plugin-vlc. Right click to enable full screen.

Cheers

 

[repairedCheese]

And greasemonkey, viewtube, and vlc are a great stopgap, don't get me wrong. But there's something magical about seeing seeing Youtube run properly. Even if the rest of the browser isn't running right. The does mean that InterWeb is getting something more than Arctic Fox from having gpu acceleration turned on, at least.

I can also report that InterWeb, accelerated, doesn't like 720p60 video at all. Lots of frames dropped. I'm not actually surprised, 720p60 and 1080p60 Youtube videos can give older gpu acceleration trouble.

 

[repairedCheese]

Also, it's maybe a little less than stable, as I managed to crash the whole system when I tried to close InterWeb while still playing a Youtube video. But if this is what a DP 2ghz G5 can really do? Then there's a lot to be hopeful for.

 

[z970]

@repairedCheese. see what happens if you try altering image.http.accept to image/jxr,image/png,image/*;q=0.8,*/*;q=0.5

If I recall, Arctic Fox used to have the same problem for images, and the above change proved a good temporary solution. I doubt it, but who knows, maybe it will do something here because the wrong types of images are messing up the rest of the page - or something or other like that...

My very fast 3.6 HT Pentium 4 coupled with a Radeon 5450 struggles with 720p60 video. On Pale Moon 28 (light browser), with foxPEP (browser accelerator) installed. Running on Window Maker, no less.

So all things considered, I think your G5 is doing pretty well. 🙂

 

[repairedCheese]

Well, my current value in InterWeb is image/webp,image/png,image/*;q=0.8,*/*;q=0.5, but it crashed again when I dragged a tab. Somehow, I'm not surprised a likely barely tested feature is horribly unstable. Like, just having wrong colors would be enough to scare most people off. And I do recall issues about the possibilities of Firefox being unstable if using hardware acceleration on certain setups.

Still, Arctic Fox runs circles around TFF, and add the possibility that, on InterWeb, Youtube in 720p, on this slow of a G5 is doable? I honestly didn't expect an adventure from this thing, and this is definitely the deep end when it comes to Linux. Sure, I could install it on my Dell Core 2 Duo, but then everything would just work, and where would the fun be?

 

[Amethyst1]

My very fast 3.6 HT Pentium 4 coupled with a Radeon 5450 [...] Running on Window Maker, no less.

I apologise for going off-topic, but I'd be interested in seeing a screenshot of your setup. 🙂
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Sure, I could install it on my Dell Core 2 Duo, but then everything would just work, and where would the fun be?

That's the spirit.

 

[z970]

I apologise for going off-topic, but I'd be interested in seeing a screenshot of your setup. 🙂

I am currently experimenting with i3 on multiple machines, which seems to make all applications (including Web browsing) slightly faster than any other WM / DE I've tried, because its resource requirement is so low.

 

[repairedCheese]

That's the spirit

Like, don't get me wrong, I do want to be able to mindlessly consume mass media. But when it just works, where's the adventure? Where's the achievement? Watching Youtube on this thing, through purpose built ppc OSX apps, through Linux using vlc and a greasemonkey script, or better yet, just properly through a brower recorded to work on the software, it's all stuff I had to learn about.

And how am I supposed to learn all about Linux if everything just works?

 

[Amethyst1]

@z970mp Nothing beats good ol' twm in all its 1987 glory. Or why not bring out the big guns with CDE? 😎

 

[z970]

Or why not bring out the big guns with CDE

CDE must be compiled from source on anything besides FreeBSD. - I did try it out on OpenBSD once... which led to an interesting experience.

Although there is always mwm if you don't feel like compiling from source. 😉