On Friday, October 3, 2014, 5:02:10 AM, Dan HorĂ¡k wrote:
On Wed, 1 Oct 2014 12:36:17 -0700
Bill Chatfield <bill_chatfield(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
> OK don't dump on me please. :-) What is the best place to
find
> instructions for how I would go about building an install CD for
> Fedora 20/21 for ppc32? I almost had Fedora 17 PPC working on it but
> I gave up because it wasn't really supported. I have run Debian
> Wheezy and Lubuntu 14.04 on this PowerBook G4 machine, but I would
> really like to have it running Fedora. I'm an experience Linux admin
> and developer but I have never build a full distribution from source.
> I know you don't officially support this, but if you could give me
> some pointers about how I could go about it, I will go away and leave
> you alone. :-) Thanks.
for F-21 we dropped 32-bit completely, so it is out of scope. F-20
has
the 32-bit variant for (almost) all packages built, but as for creating
a working installation CD one needs working anaconda (the installer
application) and other tools, I'm very sceptical, because no-one tested
them whether they don't blow up in 32-bit mode. But you can look at the
pungi tool (creates the installation tree and media) and lorax
(called by pungi, creates the installer initrd/liveos images). Not sure
if it is worth the efforts. What might be doable is to transfer a
preinstalled F-20 root filesystem (eg. via mock chroot) to the G4 disk.
For right now, I suspect that Bill will need to start with F16 (last
ppc32 release with install) and update his userspace up through F20.
I'm still planning on working up a remix for ppc32 (and have been
accumulating a lot of hardware to test it on), but am first trying to
focus on getting up to speed on ppc64 (for Mac G5s). I'd especially
like to the the Live CD/DVD builds running again, as that would make
installs and testing of boot & graphics _much_ easier. My latest G5 is
a 2.5GHz quad with 10GB of storage (bump to 16 in the mail). My intent
is to use this and the other G5s as build machines for ppc64 and
ppc32.
I've been stalled in my progress to packager status by a crazy work
schedule the last month (1 more week and that should settle a bit),
and my sponsor-to-be (masta) discovering he needs to progress himself
before he can be a sponsor. He's suggested that I get his sponsor
(Peter Robinson) to sponsor me).
Both grub2 and yaboot are always built in 32-bit mode, and support
booting either 32-bit or 64-bit kernels. There are differences
required in the boot setup installed by Anaconda but most of the
actual Anaconda code should be the same.
The F18/F19/F20 ppc64 install is not in good shape, so I expect that
the same problems will persist when built for ppc32. The lorax utility
was missing support to "bless" the boot files so that the Macs would
recognize them, but Eric Larsson provided a patched F20 Alpha ISO.
Anaconda installs grub2 as the first stage bootstrap, yaboot as the
2nd stage bootstrap, but the yaboot config is incomplete and requires
manual fixup.
The F21 Alpha TC4 is not working AT ALL on my G5s. It appears to have
a totally truncated grub2 setup (looks like intel), with NONE of the
infratructure required to boot on Mac. I'm hoping that somehow the
ppc64le grub2 setup accidently was used on the BE build, and that this
can be corrected for the beta. I'll open BZs to track this if required
- will ask on IRC what was expected, and if known issues.
The ironic thing is that the RHEL7 ppc64 builds appear to have a fully
functional grub + yaboot setup. Unfortunately, RHEL7 ppc64 has gone
POWER6+ only, and the kernel won't boot on a POWER5 box (such as my
Mac G5s).
Part of the reason I want to contribute to Fedora is to make it so
that we can keep the ppc64 POWER5+, so that hobbyist types like myself
can continue to use vintage hardware. Anyone seriously using ppc64 in
production where performance counts would be doing so in RHEL7 and
Centos and get the boost from the new instructions.
Al