Void Linux for PowerPC

[NikolaPPC]

A bit offtopic question, but.. Is somewhere here a thread about Gentoo on G5Quad? Or I'm all alone with it?

I have been following a guy on twitter who has been building a good Linux distro based on Gentoo. He has sorted a lot of byte order bugs regarding graphics, mozilla 83/4 etc.. but i didn't check up on him in the past 2 weeks, idk if he's made some progress.

Cheers, Nikola!

 

[ks23]

Jake Hamby

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

twitter

What's this..?

 

[NikolaPPC]

What's this..?

Google it

 

[Strategia]

Can you shrink HFS+ partitions using pmac-fdisk?

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

Try Gparted.

 

[NathanJHill]

Jake Hamby

Yeah, the guy posts a lot of interesting links and stuff and also thread after thread after thread, but it seems like his work has ended. He made some progress, from what I saw, but I don't know if any of it will make it upstream or help us. Seems like he is going to be getting rid of his vintage gear so who knows what that means for his effort to build a recent Firefox for PPC Linux.

 

[sparty411]

Yeah, the guy posts a lot of interesting links and stuff and also thread after thread after thread, but it seems like his work has ended. He made some progress, from what I saw, but I don't know if any of it will make it upstream or help us. Seems like he is going to be getting rid of his vintage gear so who knows what that means for his effort to build a recent Firefox for PPC Linux.

Where did he say he is getting rid of his vintage gear? Maybe I missed it. I've been following him on and off for the past several months.

 

[galgot]

Hi,
I've successfully installed void-live-ppc64-musl-20200411.iso on a iMac G5 1.8 Ghz, Triple boot Leopard-Tiger-Void. Had few days to configure it , with xfce4 and stuff, all was running fine , sound, video ....ect
Until yesterday , tried to boot it , I can get to grub , even select kernels (last installed 5.10.16.1) or recovery mode,
but I get a black screen with fans full speed after that and it stays like that, no matter what option I pick.

Weird cause that install was working perfect just the day before. And the iMac boot without problem on both Leo and Tiger, so I don't think its an hardware problem.

Any idea how to fix this before I resolve to reinstall ?
Also , would the non - musl image work better on that machine ?

Thanks

 

[galgot]

Lol... Okayyyy... Was about to give up , erase everything and reinstall, had made a new usb stick with the non-musl ppc64 image. Was struggling to make the iMac boot on it, the same command I had use before successfully wouldn't work ... Was really about to give up on a linux part, this iMac has a bad linux mojo.
unplugged the usb stick , rebooted and ...
It went straight to the installed Void !
Have no idea what was happening here. Anyway, a screenshot for celebration :



My impression about Void PPC so far. I find the install to be very easy and simple even if very different from debian like systems which I'm more used to. It's a bit more BSD like. I use XFCE4 now, but find window redrawing quite slow. Have to reinstall LXDE cause I have something broken there.
Also tried WindowMaker, but it seems there is also something broken as it doesn't show any dock icon, only the clip icon.
There is also graphic problems in firefox on certain images, but much less than in my previous debian-remix try on this iMac G5.

 

[wicknix]

I've found Mate and IceWM to be the most stable. Xfce has issues, KDE plasma has issues, and Lxqt has issues in my testing. I've also noticed window drawing is laggy on my dual 2ghz G5. Doesn't matter if the compositor is turned on or off. Better with it off, but still not perfect. Probably due to the nvidia geforce fx5200 (but its fine in ubuntu/debian). As it's a rolling release it seems not much is really tested. If it builds it gets added to the repo. I've run across a few packages that just crash on startup (gnome-twitch for example). I've had to reinstall 3 times now after updating, then powering down. Upon reboot, same issue. Black or white screen, fans on high. Sometimes i can get it back by booting the old 4.4 kernel, but sometimes even that doesn't work. Sometimes resetting the PRAM fixes it, others it doesn't. I've finally got a stable system, and i will no longer do full system updates. I locked my current kernel in place, and if i need to update a package, say firefox, i just install that with it's deps, and nothing more. So far so good. Luckily that machine also has ubuntu on it so i've been able to retrieve any documents, music etc from a broken Void before reinstalling. Oddly on my 32bit systems, it's been rock solid. Go figure.

The only real downside to you using the musl build, is that you have no access to arcticfox, interweb, or spiderweb. All of which display properly with no graphical glitches. I only use firefox for 2 websites that give the others the finger. Epiphany only renders 3/4 of a page with the entire right side cut off on both my 32 and 64bit installs, and it's slow as molasses anyway.

Cheers

 

[galgot]

I've found Mate and IceWM to be the most stable. Xfce has issues, KDE plasma has issues, and Lxqt has issues in my testing. I've also noticed window drawing is laggy on my dual 2ghz G5. Doesn't matter if the compositor is turned on or off. Better with it off, but still not perfect. Probably due to the nvidia geforce fx5200 (but its fine in ubuntu/debian). As it's a rolling release it seems not much is really tested. If it builds it gets added to the repo. I've run across a few packages that just crash on startup (gnome-twitch for example). I've had to reinstall 3 times now after updating, then powering down. Upon reboot, same issue. Black or white screen, fans on high. Sometimes i can get it back by booting the old 4.4 kernel, but sometimes even that doesn't work. Sometimes resetting the PRAM fixes it, others it doesn't. I've finally got a stable system, and i will no longer do full system updates. I locked my current kernel in place, and if i need to update a package, say firefox, i just install that with it's deps, and nothing more. So far so good. Luckily that machine also has ubuntu on it so i've been able to retrieve any documents, music etc from a broken Void before reinstalling. Oddly on my 32bit systems, it's been rock solid. Go figure.

The only real downside to you using the musl build, is that you have no access to arcticfox, interweb, or spiderweb. All of which display properly with no graphical glitches. I only use firefox for 2 websites that give the others the finger. Epiphany only renders 3/4 of a page with the entire right side cut off on both my 32 and 64bit installs, and it's slow as molasses anyway.

Cheers

Re-musl, so that is why your browsers builds wouldn't launch then... guess I'll have to re-install with the non-musl anyway. Will try Mate this time. Tried Cinnamon, but just got a black screen.
Thanks for comment.

 

[wicknix]

Yep, currently i only have builds for 32/64bit glibc versions available. Here's my minimal Mate desktop. I didn't install all the extra bells and whistles available for Mate though. Trying to keep it somewhat lightweight.

Cheers

 

[galgot]

Ok, so re-installed the non-musl and set it up , now can use you browsers build (thks again for these). My fav is Spiderweb.

Also found out why this iMac wouldn’t want to pass grub , it just doesn’t like having one of my USB hub plugged in … Also having an old iSight on the firewire port messes up with the audio driver apparently, cause alsamixer would always show « iSight » (!) as the selected audio driver… go figure. Anyway, these two must be unplugged to boot and run fine.
But once booted, the USB hub can be plugged back and things (HDs) plugged to it are recognized.

Tried Mate, but it wouldn’t work, get a black screen with vid artifacts at bottom and nothing else.
Also messes up my audio … so removed it altogether . In fact find XFCE4 more snappier on the non-musl , so will keep that.

Still have some weird issues with keyboard, some time space key get not recognized, have to logout and back in to have it working again.

I installed x11vnc server, runs fine. Installed Avahi also to be able to the vnc server on my Macs, but can't find find a way to start the Avahi-daemon... work in progress.

 

[dreadbit]

Just bought an 1T WD Blue WD10EZEX drive and was happy that it works with G5 DP 1.8G PowerMac 7.2 , even MacOSX 10.5 boots.
I want to migrate my installation of Void from the old disk; is there a recipe for doing that? Disk geometry, partition names and IDs will be different, for sure.

 

[galgot]

Just bought an 1T WD Blue WD10EZEX drive and was happy that it works with G5 DP 1.8G PowerMac 7.2 , even MacOSX 10.5 boots.
I want to migrate my installation of Void from the old disk; is there a recipe for doing that? Disk geometry, partition names and IDs will be different, for sure.

I did that with dd for a Debian install once. Complete cloning of a double boot Tiger/Debian HD to an SSD. Worked fine. Shouldn't be too different for Void.
The problem is when you clone from a smaller drive to a bigger one, of course dd will clone with the exact same size partitions, so you end up with some empty space on the bigger HD. It's not that easy to resize the partitions to use that empty space, but can be done :

Cloning an HD with MacOSX AND Linux partitions ?

well well, it was a longer journey than I thought it would be. So I cloned the hd disk image on the ssd, all went fine, Ti booted fine on both Tiger and Debian. But... : I cloned a 60GB image to a 64GB ssd. So I had a 25GB size Tiger partition and 4GB empty space at the end of the ssd...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[ftalbot]

Re-musl, so that is why your browsers builds wouldn't launch then... guess I'll have to re-install with the non-musl anyway. Will try Mate this time. Tried Cinnamon, but just got a black screen.
Thanks for comment.

Hi. I was too lazy to reinstall a non-musl Void (and a bit affraid I would mess something), so I went the chroot way. It still needs some ironing, but I'm writing this in Arctic Fox (thanks wicknix!) on musl Void.
I used this guide.

 

[wicknix]

Nice! To get the arctic fox gtk2 theme to match, maybe try installing something like lxappearance (or some form of gtk-theme-switch) and the arc dark theme on the glibc chroot.

 

[ftalbot]

Nice! To get the arctic fox gtk2 theme to match, maybe try installing something like lxappearance (or some form of gtk-theme-switch) and the arc dark theme on the glibc chroot.

Done! With the proper theme and a menu entry.

Thanks again for your excellent work.

 

[smnbldwn]

Has anyone successfully got the internal Bluetooth working on a 1.67GHz PowerBook G4 with Void? It works if I plug in a USB dongle but it would be ideal if I could get it to detect and work with the built-in one. The inbuilt bluetooth adapter works fine with Leopard and used to work with Ubuntu 16.04. I have gone through the Void manual and looked around for info online without success, I even asked on the IRC but no success. Does anyone have any troubleshooting tips? Thank you in advance...

 

[smnbldwn]

Has anyone successfully got the internal Bluetooth working on a 1.67GHz PowerBook G4 with Void? It works if I plug in a USB dongle but it would be ideal if I could get it to detect and work with the built-in one. The inbuilt bluetooth adapter works fine with Leopard and used to work with Ubuntu 16.04. I have gone through the Void manual and looked around for info online without success, I even asked on the IRC but no success. Does anyone have any troubleshooting tips? Thank you in advance...

Here's something weird, although bluetooth doesn't seem to work with the internal adapter, my Apple bluetooth mouse connected and worked, I noticed this by accident. I had paired it in Mac OSX so maybe it just recognised the MAC address and went ahead and connected...

 

[smnbldwn]

Here's a tip for when you need a browser for Google Drive or similar. Otter Browser works really well. It also connects to my work dashboard. Only Midori will do this and that has a strange colour scheme. Otter works, its quite quick and no weird colours. I still mainly use Arctic Fox/Spiderweb but it nice to have alternatives.

 

[ildoddo]

Hello guys, I'm trying to install Void on Powermac G4 MDD with Radeon 9600 video card but I have big problems with the graphics. In the past I installed Void on G5 with Quadro 4500 video card without any problem. After booting the installation disk, the screen remains black. I was able to do the installation via SSH connection. But even with direct boot from hard drive, I have the same problem. The only way to get a working console, is to enter the parameter "nomodeset" in the GRUB options. Of course this way it can't load the video driver because KMS is missing. Do you have any experience with this?

 

[dreadbit]

Guys, I'm trying to configure grub to show bootlog on screen during boot.
I've tried

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="plymouth.enable=0 console=tty1 earlyprintk nosplash debug noquiet loglevel=4 --verbose"
GRUB_TERMINAL_INPUT=console
GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT=console
and have
$ cat /proc/cmdline
BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinux-5.10.25_1 root=UUID=3cec50c3-e0b2-4b14-a092-54e9a8f1de8b ro plymouth.enable=0 console=tty1 earlyprintk nosplash debug noquiet loglevel=4 --verbose
, but nothing helps.

What's the magic? (powerbook g4 void-libc)

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

@dreadbit​

Try REMOVE all this options from _LINUX_DEFAULT string (M.B. comment GRUB_TERMINAL strings too). Mine linux systems never have such options & I see everything from kernel loading up to X11 displaymanager.