OpenSUSE Tumbleweed

[mansley12]

Oh, and when it boots, you can then install whatever desktop environment will work for you.

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

I'll try in free-time (most probably - week-end). Thanks!

 

[Macbookprodude]

Question for Linux pros out there - for a G4 PB, any.. what Linux is best for it ? My goal is to replace OS X Leopard and just use Linux or even FreeBSD.

 

[mansley12]

Question for Linux pros out there - for a G4 PB, any.. what Linux is best for it ? My goal is to replace OS X Leopard and just use Linux or even FreeBSD.

I am not a pro, but look on the previous page. wicknix provided some feedback on that, but here is is direct post. I think he would recommend lubuntu 12.04. I know the link says 16.04, but he has both links there.

Lubuntu 16.04 Remix (updated)

2023 update For anybody still using this (16.04 v2) i created a tutorial with some extra files to extend the life of it. Basically we change the sources.list to Debians (since Ubuntu's repo is dead) and make a few changes to allow packages to be updated and installable again. Download it here...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[mansley12]

I was able to get youtube working. I am using pipe-viewer, a fork of staw on my opensuse build

 

[Macbookprodude]

Well, under Lubuntu remix I used the browser and YouTube played nicely.

 

[mansley12]

Well, under Lubuntu remix I used the browser and YouTube played nicely.

Which browser?

 

[Macbookprodude]

Arctic Fox

 

[mansley12]

Arctic Fox

Interesting. I have Artic Fox installed but it cannot load youtube videos. Did you need to do any other work for it?

 

[Macbookprodude]

I installed what Wicknix told me - Remix 16.05 ?? I can’t remember the version at this time, but I did try it youtube and it worked.

 

[wicknix]

You need to enable webm in preferences. Disable the "asynchronous" check box and enable webm. Or install greasemonkey, mozplugger and viewtube script.

Cheers

 

[wicknix]

How to here.

Another YouTube viewer/player for powerpc

I came across this, and decided to give it a shot on Ubuntu 16.04.7 (remix). I'd assume it'd be possible to build the CLI version on 10.4/10.5 as well with macports perl, but i haven't tried that yet. It works very well. Fast too. Download the 0.0.8 release found here. Now you'll need to...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[mansley12]

How to here.

Another YouTube viewer/player for powerpc

I came across this, and decided to give it a shot on Ubuntu 16.04.7 (remix). I'd assume it'd be possible to build the CLI version on 10.4/10.5 as well with macports perl, but i haven't tried that yet. It works very well. Fast too. Download the 0.0.8 release found here. Now you'll need to...

forums.macrumors.com

Cool. Thanks to both of you. Pipe/Straw-viewer, which I believe was also reviewed, where's great. The command line is nice and fast.. I will do the procedure for Arctic Fox too. Awesome 😎

 

[mansley12]

How to here.

Another YouTube viewer/player for powerpc

I came across this, and decided to give it a shot on Ubuntu 16.04.7 (remix). I'd assume it'd be possible to build the CLI version on 10.4/10.5 as well with macports perl, but i haven't tried that yet. It works very well. Fast too. Download the 0.0.8 release found here. Now you'll need to...

forums.macrumors.com

Great that worked. Now I have two working options. Question, I have a 9600 radeon. I have confirmed all the drivers and the system is using hardware acceleration via the r300 driver, but the desktop moves really slow. Top doesn't suggest the CPU or memory are the bottleneck/pegged. Any ideas? I am really not doing anything but either open arctic fox or pipe-viewer to play music.

When I drag windows across the desktop there is not smooth at all. There is ghosting when dragging.

 

[mansley12]

Compton seems to help a little. I ran through some of these exercises:

SDB:SSD performance - openSUSE Wiki

en.opensuse.org

Installing Debian Linux on PPC Part IV - Configuring Stuff

[4/24/15: Updated for Jessie stable] Once you've gotten past the login screen, you will likely be confronted with this as your desktop: ...

ppcluddite.blogspot.com

 

[wicknix]

If you are using Mate, disable the Marco compositor. It will speed up window dragging/drawing. At least in Void using the same graphics card that worked for me. Actually disable any compositor. Xfce had the same result until I disabled the compositor.

 

[adderthorn]

1. Download the PPC 64 version of tumbleweed and burn to DVD
http://download.opensuse.org/ports/ppc/tumbleweed/iso/
2. My video card that some issues with some of the desktop environments, and on top of that installation doesn't seem to go well if I do any of the suggested desktop environments within the installer. That said, I specifically choose server mode with no desktop.
3. When yo go to format the paritions make sure the OS is ext4
4.Let the install finish.. I did select the third party repositories
4. Boot a live CD like Adélie
https://www.adelielinux.org/download/
5. Boot up to the live CD
7. select c to get grub menu.
8.. Enter ls make sure you see the entry in the next step.
9. Enter the following:

You can tab both Linux, Initrid, and the /boot directory for autocomplete. Also, make sure you use the guided partition during the install and when formatting the ssd. Otherwise, the below might not match. In that case, you will need to make sure you know the partitions or just guess. When you are in grub - type "ls" and try each ieee1275/hd,gpt<1-x> until you find the boot partition.

root=(ieee1275/hd,gpt2)
Linux /boot/<VMlinux kernel> root=/dev/sda2
Initrid /boot/<initrid>
boot

Some of the of the above is dependent on your configuration.

I've been having an issue here, It seems GPT2 would be where my OS is but the directory structure is empty. Shame I didn't see any of this before diving in and spending 2+ hours waiting for tumbleweed to install to find out it can't boot.

 

[mansley12]

I boot through a live DVD, as detailed in at the end above post. However, you might be able to boot via open firmware and see from there instead..

Something like boot hd:\grub or boot ultra1:\grub. I might have the slashes wrong.

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

@adderthorn
@mansley12
Just figured out - you're installing SUBJ to built-in controllers, wright? SATA or m.b. even IDE. My setup is a bit more complicated - I;ve installed SAS card (LSI 3041E-R) & installed a pair linux distros to SAS drives . By some unknown to me reason, if I go to GRUB command line & typing ls - it don't shows SAS drives at all, just SAS card itself, if I understand its output correctly.

 

[adderthorn]

@adderthorn
@mansley12
Just figured out - you're installing SUBJ to built-in controllers, wright? SATA or m.b. even IDE. My setup is a bit more complicated - I;ve installed SAS card (LSI 3041E-R) & installed a pair linux distros to SAS drives . By some unknown to me reason, if I go to GRUB command line & typing ls - it don't shows SAS drives at all, just SAS card itself, if I understand its output correctly.

Interesting. I might be a bit unique in that I'm attempting to install on an iMac G5 built-in SATA drive. I did see someone on the openSUSE bugzilla posted this note that he was able to get it working by using HFS tools after install and copying back over the install. I'm going to give this route a shot.

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

openSUSE bugzilla posted this note

Too cumbersome, as for me .

 

[mansley12]

Interesting. I might be a bit unique in that I'm attempting to install on an iMac G5 built-in SATA drive. I did see someone on the openSUSE bugzilla posted this note that he was able to get it working by using HFS tools after install and copying back over the install. I'm going to give this route a shot.

It is not too hard. I did it before.

 

[pc297]

So for those running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on G5s who are also interested in running x86 Linux software on it, I can confirm that PowerVM-LX86 seems functional on G5s under ppc64 OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I could only do a partial install though so far (the result of which looks like a minimal base system install, likely because it's actually meant to install on ppc64 SLES9-11/RHEL5-6) but it seems to be enough to run x86 ELF command line stuff on G5s (I don't know yet about X11 stuff). How to go about it:

1) Download the latest PowerVM-LX86 installer (powervm-lx86-installer-1.4.0.0-1.tgz) from IBM:

ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/server/lx86/

2) extract it:

 tar zxvf powervm-lx86-installer-1.4.0.0-1.tgz

3) The installer has to be fooled into thinking it's installing on SLES-11 by adding the attached /etc/SuSE-release:

sudo cp /path/to/SuSE-release /etc/

4) The installer still needs to be further fooled by manually modifying powervm-lx86-installer-1.4.1.0-1/lib/Maiken/UtilFunctions.pm (which I can't post fully for legal reasons) with the following code (perl) in place of the SLES section:

  # SLES
  if (-f "$root/etc/SuSE-release") {
    my $release = $self->slurp("$root/etc/SuSE-release");
    if ($release =~ /SUSE Linux Enterprise Server/i) {
      my $distro = "SLES";
      if ($release =~ /VERSION = (\d+)/) {
    $distro .= $1;
      }
      if ($release =~ /PATCHLEVEL = (\d+)/) {
    $distro .= "SP$1";
      }
      return "SLES11SP1";
    }
    return "SLES11SP1";
  }
 
  return 'unknown';
}

5) Version 2.1.2 of IBM's Advance Toolchain version 2.1.2 (at05) is needed which can be obtained at:

ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/server/POWER/Linux/toolchain/at/at05/suse/SLES_11/

(you're better off adding the sources to zypper to make sure the latest version is automatically selected, see IBM's documentation at https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/advtool-install and adapt it to SLES-10 which has at05, just add ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/server/POWER/Linux/toolchain/at/at05/suse/SLES_11/ to the zypper sources)

install it via zypper/yast

6) modify powervm-lx86-1.4.1.0-1-SLES11.ppc64.rpm with rpmrebuild and remove the libgcc dependency (libgcc is obsolete and superseded by libgcc_s1, which you then should enter instead of libgcc)

7) You need to

sudo zypper install lsb lsb-release

However this not quite enough (the Tumbleweed lsb package is a virtual lsb and the PowerVM-LX86 installer also physically needs /etc/lib/lsb/init-functions, /usr/lib/lsb/install_initd and /usr/lib/lsb/remove_initd) and you need to download redhat-lsb-core-4.1-44.fc28.ppc64.rpm and extract it (or use the attached zipped version) and

sudo mkdir /lib/lsb
sudo mkdir /usr/lib/lsb
sudo cp /path/to/redhat-lsb-core-4.1-44.fc28.ppc64/etc/lib/lsb/init-functions /etc/lib/lsb/
sudo cp /path/to/redhat-lsb-core-4.1-44.fc28.ppc64/usr/lib/lsb/install_initd /usr/lib/lsb
sudo cp /path/to/redhat-lsb-core-4.1-44.fc28.ppc64/usr/lib/lsb/remove_initd /usr/lib/lsb

8) You need to download the required SLES-11 x86 rpms (for x86-world) from

Index of /repo/$RCE/SLES11-SP1-Pool/sle-11-i586/rpm

You can also use the wget scripts attached to download the mimimal install and run

wget -i files_to_download.txt

9) start the installer

cd /path/to/powervm-lx86-installer-1.4.1.0-1
sudo ./installer

you will need to register via the installer

Then select:

1. Install Software.

Then

1. Install powervm-lx86 + x86 World

Follow the instructions until the installer asks you for which version of x86-world you would like to install, select SLES-11 SP1 minimal, after which the installer asks you for the location of the SLES-11 x86 rpms, enter the folder where you downloaded the SLES-11 SP1 x86 rpms.

Setup hangs after installing x86 world RPMs. But even though it hangs, it seems to have installed a minimal system that is enough to run basic x86 stuff. Likely the installer has further issues with OpenSUSE (it expects SLES9-11 or RHEL5-6). If anyone has any isos for the ppc64 versions it would be greatly appreciated (not available from SUSE or RHEL servers anymore afaik at least with an evaluation subscription).

10) To run it, you need to manually

 sudo /opt/bin/powervm-lx86-daemon

then

cd /i386
/opt/bin/powervm-lx86 <x86_elf_binary>

(so far only stuff in the /i386 directory can be run by PowerVM-LX86, this might be possible to overcome as the installer does offer the possibility to run stuff from the /home directories. So it might be down to an environment variable that does not get set as the installation does not complete; I need to look in the install script to find out if it's that and what it is.

Also ideally, x86 binaries would normally be run with the runx86 script, but the installation halts before it can generate it. There is however a template in the installer folder, I will try to use it to make a working version of runx86.

Work in progress but it does indeed confirm that PowerVM-LX86 not only runs on POWER5/5/6/7 but also on PowerPC 970s! As you can see the x86 version of uname -a correctly shows "i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux" and the x86 version of lscpu correctly recognises 4 i686 cpus


Cheers,

 

[pc297]

Update on PowerVM-LX86 on the G5 under OpenSUSE Tumbleweed: I tried to get some benchmarks with either sysbench (sysbench-0.4.8-75.38.i586) or Geekbench 2.4.3 (x86).

• Sysbench does start with PowerVM-LX86 but crashes whenever a benchmark is started (illegal instruction then core dump). I will try with different versions as this one is from OpenSUSE 11.1 which would be almost a couple of years older than SLES11 SP1. I will try with different versions (sysbench-0.3.2-38.i586, sysbench-0.4.8-61.1.i586, sysbench-0.4.10-3.fc11.i586 etc).
• GeekBench 2.4.3 (x86) does start PowerVM-LX86 and goes through everything fine until Lua, during which it segfaults. I will see if I need some deps that are not present there (notably i586 lua libs). I will try another version, ideally one that still has a PowerMac equivalent for comparison (e.g. 2.2.7)

Or if anyone knows some simpler benchmarks e.g. to just get Bogomips (the i586 SLES 11 version of lscpu does not show them with PowerVM-LX86, so it is likely that neither /proc/cpuinfo or hwinfo can be used to obtain them either).

I had originally thought of hardinfo but that would very likely be a stretch as it does require a lot of X11 stuff which simply isn't there yet, and it was already a pain to install on ppc64 Tumbleweed (not available and could neither be compiled with rpmbuild or a standard make as ppc64 was excluded in the spec and Makefile so I had to convert hardinfo_0.5.1+git20180227-2.1+b1_ppc64.deb from ppc64 deb to rpm with alien along with the required deps which were not available for ppc64 Tumbleweed), but who knows what it would be with the added complexity layer of running it within PowerVM-LX86, that said the deps seem to be there for i586 so maybe something like. hardinfo-0.5.1-2.1.9.i586.rpm (OpenSUSE 13.2), or something older e.g. hardinfo-0.4.2-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm (RHEL5) or hardinfo-0.3.6-0.dag.rhel3.i386.rpm (RHEL3) might work headless in command line mode under PowerVM-LX86 with the right deps.

Btw the modern ppc64 versions, sysbench_1.0.20+ds-2_ppc64.deb and sysbench-1.0.20-benchmark.75.41.ppc64.rpm for both debian and OpenSUSE, respectively, were not straightforward and pretty tough to install, respectively, I had to get libluajit-5.1-common (2.1.0~beta3+git20210112+dfsg-2) manually from Debian Snapshot, then could install it on Debian; for OpenSUSE the deps are not availale for ppc64 so I had to convert them to rpm and copy libs from /lib/powerpc64-gnu-linux to /lib64 and only then was I able to install it. Then they both run fine under ppc64 Debian and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. If I do get an earlier version of i586 sysbench to work with PowerVM-LX86, I would then install the ppc64 version on OpenSUSE for comparison

 

[pc297]

So this is the output of Geekbench 2.2.7 before it crashes with PowerVM-LX86, doesn't look too stellar...