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Void Linux for PowerPC

smnbldwn said:
I think this isn't for 32 bit ppc.
Click to expand...
The only 32-bit PPC Linux I can think of which has any version of Firefox originally released upstream at any point in 2020 is Adiéle, which has Firefox ESR 68.10.0. Haven't spent any time attempting to test it, though.

Void for 32-bit PPC only has webkit browsers in its package repository, which depending on your system may or may not require some adjustments to work around graphics driver compositing bugs.
 
...well, sadly, openBSD has been shed from my TiBook 1GHz for the moment due to my lack of staying power, and macbuntu went funny and stopped booting, but void-linux on a freshly re-partitioned hard drive c/w Leopard is proving to be fun and stable and much much faster once I removed
Code: 
slub_debug=P page_poison=1
from
Code: 
/etc/default/grub
.
The normal USB 1.1 ports at the back behave normally. The TiBook is scruffy but all works except for the internal SuperDrive which I fitted years ago to replace the first broken one. OF booting works ok from USB 1.1, FireWire works for external FA66 audio card, Target Mode Boot, DVD burning and HD r/w in external caddy.
[PROBLEM]: I am currently trying to get my ADHD head around kernel modules and how they work, and why my AKE BC168 2 x USB 2.0 ExpressCard gives me worse than USB 1.1 speeds (~600kB/sec) in void (on HFS+ and exFAT external drives), whereas with Leopard it gives me a nice (~17MB/sec) read speed.
I've been repairing my FireWire caddy and unblocking my DVD writer to burn another ppc distro to compare voidlinux to, to find the source of the slow USB 2.0 ExpressCard speed, and swotting up on lspci, modprobe and stuff which I haven't had to understand up until now, but if anyone has any clever ideas, then I could keep my brain empty for things that matter, like music, motorbikes and guitars.
From what little I understand it seems as if the correct high speed module (ehci_hcd ??) is loaded, and loaded first, but I'm noobie with years of noobieness behind me so I could be wrong.
 
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Hi
I am trying to install void – live -ppc64 on my G5 2 ghz power pc
and am stuck at the partitioning stage of the installation.
I have installed gparted to partition the single 320GB hard drive.
The swap is using linux-swap the others ext4?

Device Type Name Size System

/dev/sdX1 Apple_partition_map Apple - Partition map
/dev/sdX2 Apple_Bootstrap bootstrap 800k NewWorld bootlock
/dev/sdX3 Apple_UNIX_SVR2 rootfs any Linux native
d/ev/sdX4 Apple_UNIX_SVR2 swap any Linux swap

Once the dive is partition correctly, how do I carry on the installation?
Does any one know of a tutorial that could help?

I am very new to this and a push in the right direction would be much appreciated.
 
AFAIK, in process of Void installation, Apple Bootstrap partition have to be named exactly (& case-sensitive) Apple Bootstrap, or installer wouldn't be able to install bootloader. BTW, make it a bit larger, around several 2-8 Mbs. (Again, excuse my bad english 😀 ).
 
Hutzpah said:
Thanks for all the help.
sqeeezy, I will go and read through the link you posted.
Click to expand...
yeah, good luck, I found it not too difficult, and I've got the attention span of a goldfish.
If you read the Installation Guide ref @wicknix it'll link to a Partitioning Guide with particular reference to Power PC Macs.
The link I posted refers to a problem the void installer has with a standard size bootstrap partition, apparently it needs more, so I followed those instructions, gave it 10MB as suggested and it all went fine.
On my G4 it's better than any other distro I've tried: once I did the SLUB edits detailed in my first post.
It should be very responsive on a G5 and it seems well-supported by the void team.
I'm still trying to get my USB2 ExpressCard to read at speed, but apart from that, it's good.
 
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Hello. I am trying to install void-live-ppc64-20200411-xfce.iso on a G5 PowerMac 7,3 AGP. The graphics card is an AGP ATI Rage128 Pro borrowed from a PowerMac G4 while I wait for a Radeon 9600 to arrive and working fine with OSX and MorphOS. I'm experiencing a problem in that while booting the install CD I get a blank screen that keeps flashing every ~5 seconds momentarily to console1 with login prompt then back again to black (no user interaction has yet taken place since booting the DVD and it's the time that I would expect X should start).

I can manually switch to the console with CTRL-ALT-1 but it automatically switches back to black within a few seconds.

Though needing to repeatedly switch back to the console with CTRL-ALT-1 every 5 seconds I can log in.

/var/log/Xorg.0.log includes the message "AddScreen/ScreenInit failed for driver 0" but I don't know what else to look for.

Any suggestions?
 
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I am now a convert to Void, sound working beautifully after I removed Pulseaudio. My next challenge is bluetooth.
I have installed bluez and blueman and got the bluetoothd service running but I get the message "No default controller available" when I try to use it.

lsusb detects the bluetooth device: Bus 002 Device 002: ID 05ac:1000 Apple, Inc. Bluetooth HCI MacBookPro (HID mode)

But no joy trying to get it to work.

rfkill shows it is not blocked:

$ rfkill
ID TYPE DEVICE SOFT HARD
0 wlan phy0 unblocked unblocked

Although the bluetooth is not detected by rfkill either.

Any advice? Thank you....
 
ks23 said:
Look at this page:

Graphics - Void Linux for PPC (unofficial) documentation

docs.voidlinux-ppc.org docs.voidlinux-ppc.org

Maybe it helps
Click to expand...
Thank you. That page says in relation to Rage Pro: "It will not work out of box - you need to correctly set up your modelines in xorg.conf.d to make it work." but I've been unable to find any examples of this.

Does anyone know how I should set up xorg.conf.d so that voidlinux-ppc supports my Rage128 Pro?

I have installed the xf86-video-r128 driver with... xbps-install -S xf86-video-r128

The original /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-amdgpu.conf is as follows:

Section "OutputClass"
Identifier "AMDgpu"
MatchDriver "amdgpu"
Driver "amd"
EndSection

I assume I need to change Driver line above from "amd" to "xf86-video-r128"?

I've tried creating a new file /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-monitor.conf as follows:

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "VGA1"
Modeline "1280x1024_60.00" 109.00 1280 1368 1496 1712 1024 1027 1034 1063 -hsync +vsync
Option "PreferredMode" "1280x1024_60.00"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Monitor "VGA1"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Modes "1280x1024_60.00"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Though I must say I've no idea if that is even close!

The current output of /var/log/Xorg.0.log: here

I'm struggling with this and would appreciate guidance. If it is too hard then perhaps I should just wait for the mac Radeon 9600 to arrive, which I hope would be more straight-foward to get working than this mac Rage128 Pro.
 
Last edited:
smnbldwn said:
I am now a convert to Void, sound working beautifully after I removed Pulseaudio. My next challenge is bluetooth.
I have installed bluez and blueman and got the bluetoothd service running but I get the message "No default controller available" when I try to use it.

lsusb detects the bluetooth device: Bus 002 Device 002: ID 05ac:1000 Apple, Inc. Bluetooth HCI MacBookPro (HID mode)

But no joy trying to get it to work.

rfkill shows it is not blocked:

$ rfkill
ID TYPE DEVICE SOFT HARD
0 wlan phy0 unblocked unblocked

Although the bluetooth is not detected by rfkill either.

Any advice? Thank you....
Click to expand...
rfkill bluetooth on didn't work either. Do I need a proprietary driver or something? Bluetooth just worked in Ubuntu 16 so it must be in the Linux kernel somewhere...
neofetch.png
 
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I was blown away to discover a modern non BSD based distro for 32bit ppc. I have an (infamous?) ibook duel USB that i know worked 10ish years ago when I installed gentoo on it, but for the life of me I can't get 2D acceleration to work in X11. I understand the kernel has changed how it does graphics drivers and I know 3D is a lost cause most likely, but I would love to get 2D working in r128 vs using fbdev. Server starts in r128 but is just a blank screen.

I must note that running a 5.9 kernel is pretty amazing on this hardware. In console it feels pretty snappy, and the original battery even gets an hour of use. Obviously its not a serious computer at this point but getting a usable desktop would be great.

edit: I'm using musl if that changes anything
 
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eld said:
Thank you. That page says in relation to Rage Pro: "It will not work out of box - you need to correctly set up your modelines in xorg.conf.d to make it work." but I've been unable to find any examples of this.

Does anyone know how I should set up xorg.conf.d so that voidlinux-ppc supports my Rage128 Pro?

I have installed the xf86-video-r128 driver with... xbps-install -S xf86-video-r128

The original /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-amdgpu.conf is as follows:

Section "OutputClass"
Identifier "AMDgpu"
MatchDriver "amdgpu"
Driver "amd"
EndSection

I assume I need to change Driver line above from "amd" to "xf86-video-r128"?

I've tried creating a new file /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-monitor.conf as follows:

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "VGA1"
Modeline "1280x1024_60.00" 109.00 1280 1368 1496 1712 1024 1027 1034 1063 -hsync +vsync
Option "PreferredMode" "1280x1024_60.00"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Monitor "VGA1"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Modes "1280x1024_60.00"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Though I must say I've no idea if that is even close!

The current output of /var/log/Xorg.0.log: here

I'm struggling with this and would appreciate guidance. If it is too hard then perhaps I should just wait for the mac Radeon 9600 to arrive, which I hope would be more straight-foward to get working than this mac Rage128 Pro.
Click to expand...

Did you get that modeline from cvt? have you tried using the fbdev driver? It looks like it either can't find the monitor you are using or can't put it into a usable state. Have you tried lower resolutions or color depths?
 
mtm84 said:
I was blown away to discover a modern non BSD based distro for 32bit ppc. I have an (infamous?) ibook duel USB that i know worked 10ish years ago when I installed gentoo on it, but for the life of me I can't get 2D acceleration to work in X11. I understand the kernel has changed how it does graphics drivers and I know 3D is a lost cause most likely, but I would love to get 2D working in r128 vs using fbdev. Server starts in r128 but is just a blank screen.

I must note that running a 5.9 kernel is pretty amazing on this hardware. In console it feels pretty snappy, and the original battery even gets an hour of use. Obviously its not a serious computer at this point but getting a usable desktop would be great.

edit: I'm using musl if that changes anything
Click to expand...
From what I learned recently, musl must use the free open source graphics drivers, which means hardware acceleration is a no go... at least with the nouveau (NVIDIA) driver. The ATI driver may be better.

I've started tinkering with Adelie Linux on my G5 and have had mixed results. I need to try void soon.
 
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z970mp said:
@NathanJHill Where did you read that musl requires FOSS drivers?
Click to expand...
It was in a chat with Adelie Linux devs as I was talking/working through some glitches in their MATE Live CD. I need to look a little more into it, so if you know more, let me know. It may only relate to their particular distribution, perhaps?

From what I have found in some general searches, the proprietary Nvidia drivers require glibc and are not compiled for musl.

My comments may not be very helpful, as I really need to give voidPPC a test drive shortly (although I have tested the Intel version in VirtualBox). And, to add, maybe PowerPC Macs don't even need to worry about those proprietary drivers because of the age of our video cards.
 
NathanJHill said:
From what I learned recently, musl must use the free open source graphics drivers, which means hardware acceleration is a no go... at least with the nouveau (NVIDIA) driver. The ATI driver may be better.

I've started tinkering with Adelie Linux on my G5 and have had mixed results. I need to try void soon.
Click to expand...
As far as I remember when I had gentoo installed it was the open source xf86 r128 driver. I just don't know why the screen turns blank with the r128 driver. At least with an xorg crash it could tell me something useful, but I don't seem to have any indication that something is wrong as far as the software thinks.
 
Got void linux going on my dual powermac g5 1.8, but when I load into the desktop(mate) navigating is very sluggish and choppy. I have an ati radeon 9600 installed, and from what i read the their wiki that is a very well supported card. I haven't messed with the configs much, do i need to tweak them at all to get it running better?
 
I had the same issue with the same gfx card on my dual 2ghz g5. I ended up swapping in the nvidia GeForce fx5200 from my 1.6ghz g5 and now its buttery smooth. I did however roll back to the 4.4 kernel as all the 5.x kernels either wouldn't boot, or had graphics display issues (unreadable text and tearing) after a few minutes of being booted. For what it's worth the same issues happened with Debians 5.x kernels as well on the same machines. 4.x kernels worked fine.
 
wicknix said:
I had the same issue with the same gfx card on my dual 2ghz g5. I ended up swapping in the nvidia GeForce fx5200 from my 1.6ghz g5 and now its buttery smooth. I did however roll back to the 4.4 kernel as all the 5.x kernels either wouldn't boot, or had graphics display issues (unreadable text and tearing) after a few minutes of being booted. For what it's worth the same issues happened with Debians 5.x kernels as well on the same machines. 4.x kernels worked fine.
Click to expand...
ah bummer! That's actually the card I had in it before i got a 9600 for the dual dvi ports. I sold the 5200 sadly to recoup the cash. I'll give 4.4 a go and see if that helps out, thanks!
 
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