Thanks for the info Dan and Al.
Right, I'm interested in ppc32 from a hobbyist perspective. Red Hat/CentOS would be
for production. The difference between running MacOS X and Linux on this machine is like
night and day, with Linux being the "day". I think the effort to make things
work on older hardware forces one to think more about efficiency versus waste, which is a
good thing to consider.
I have a Fedora 17 PPC install disk. And now I know, by experimenting with Lubuntu PPC,
which kernel parameters are required to get X to start up on my machine, so I can probably
start with Fedora 17. But, it looks like I'll need to upgrade through to F20.
--------------------------------------------
On Fri, 10/3/14, Al Dunsmuir <al.dunsmuir(a)sympatico.ca> wrote:
Subject: Re: Mac PowerBook G4
To: ppc(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
Cc: bill_chatfield(a)yahoo.com, "Dan Horák" <dan(a)danny.cz>
Date: Friday, October 3, 2014, 6:05 AM
On Friday, October 3, 2014, 5:02:10
AM, Dan Horák 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