I guess this is the T2 linux thread, so I thought I'd put some notes here from my experience installing it on a Mini.
T2 linux may be one of the most up to date versions that still installs/runs on our hardware. It may be one of the most linuxy versions too, as everything builds from source that is downloaded from the internet and you need to be somewhat knowledgeable to get anything done. This is good in most ways, but if you're in a hurry, cross compiling from some other machine may be faster. Any package not included in the installer will need to be compiled. In my case, it's still cold out and I have excess solar electricity to burn (and heat the house), so having one or more computers in the corner compiling stuff continuously is a benefit.
To get started with installation on the Mini, download
dl.t2sde.org/binary/2024/t2-24.12-ppc-base-wayland-glibc-gcc-603.iso
from
dl.t2sde.org/binary/2024/
I think the version is simply the year.month that it was compiled and there may be newer ones as you read this. Then put it on a USB stick. From a command line (Terminal) confirm the USB location with:
diskutil list then put the image onto the USB stick, from the download location e.g.:
dd if =./t2-24.12-ppc-base-wayland-glibc-gcc-603.iso of=/dev/rdisk2 bs=1m
There will not be any indication of progress from the command line, but you can open Activity Monitor and watch the Disk Activity if you want. For me it only took a few minutes on the Mini with ~10MB/s transfer rate. When it finishes it should mount in Finder and show the contents of the installer.
Then boot the Mini from the USB stick. From Open Firmware, confirm the USB stick is recognized:
dir ud:,\\ then boot with
boot ud:,\\:tbxi
I followed most of the default options for installation, except I used ext3 filesystem so the files should be accessible from other (older) versions of linux if needed. Most of the documentation
www.t2sde.org/documentation/ refers to running the "./t2" script, which doesn't exist in the installation until you connect to the internet and do:
cd /usr/src/t2-src
svn up
I finally figured that out when I found this page (has a bunch of other useful info):
www.t2sde.org/kb/8/
You will want to add users besides root with commands like:
groupadd someone
useradd -m -g someone someone
passwd someone
As with most other linux versions you can have multiple logins/screens to see what's going on with Option-F1/F2/F3 etc.
I wanted to see if gcc14 is any better than gcc4, or if it just has 10 more layers of bloat. I'm now compiling different things to compare against the same code compiled with gcc under Mac OS X 10.4...
