> for end users, if a new distribution does not include a reasonably
> modern web browser, then it is of limited or even no use.

Adélie Linux 1.0-ALPHA6 (04/2018) seems to include Otter Browser 0.9.96 (03/2018), which uses QtWebEngine/QtWebKit.

Quote:
It would be interesting to know which version of Webkit is being used on PowerPC specifically (as a base for QtWebkit).

Based on ernsteiswuerfel's comments on the Otter Browser's bug tracker, it sounds like there are massive endianess issues when Javascript is enabled on PowerPC:

https://github.com/OtterBrowser/otter-browser/issues/1435

Put differently, the browser engine may be modern but it appears to also be fairly broken.

Quote:

Thanks for the info Ernst, I'll definitely have a play with it.

Void Linux has been ported to PPC

https://forum.voidlinux.org/t/porting-void-to-powerpc/6228

I've tried the openSUSE Tumbleweed.
And it booted, but at some stage the screen went blank and... nothing.
Tried several times so see where it hangs. Seems like when loading X. But I gave up. Sadly, but no priority for me.


Manfred

I'm going to try Debian 9.5. It would be awesome if it worked.

EDIT: Hmm...dont think there is an installer for 9.5...

[ Edited by TheMagicM 31.07.2018 - 21:37 ]

Quote:

They don't support ppc anymore.

NetBSD do though.


https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/macppc/

> They don't support ppc anymore.

It's been relegated to Debian Ports:

http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/10.0/powerpc/iso-cd/
http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/10.0/ppc64/iso-cd/

> there is also a relatively new Linux Distribution targetting
> ppc/ppc64 as tier1 supported platforms [...]: Adelie Linux

Another one:
https://fienixppc.blogspot.com (website)
https://fienixppc-news.blogspot.com (news blog)
http://ppcutopia.ddns.net/repos/apt/debian/ (repository)

Fienix looks pretty good. Based on Debian which I run on my x64 Thinkpad.

As usually with these type of distributions, the question is whether it features a recent browser with properly working Javascript.

Seems a realistic target for a modern browser running on PPC Linux (BE and LE) will be Firefox 65. People around the Talos II put quite some effort in it: klick

Chromium is also in the works but not that advanced in porting efforts, and it seems to involve a lot more work.

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I just want a Linux distro that is somewhat up-to-date. If a browser isnt as up-to-date along with js, I'm ok with that.

Its tough finding a distro for my G5 that works and is modern.

Quote:
As already suggested in this thread there are some. I run Gentoo and Adelie Linux on my G5 which both run out of the box and got a modern software stack. Adelie is faster and uses less resources 'cause of being built against musl (instead of glibc).

Quote:

Have you tried CentOS 7? https://wiki.centos.org/Download

I have their power9 offering working on my Talos2 with both KDE and Gnome. So far,, so good. :)

>> Its tough finding a distro for my G5 that works and is modern.

> Have you tried CentOS 7? https://wiki.centos.org/Download

Their PPC64(BE) offering is tailored to POWER7. I doubt it will run on POWER4-derived PPC970 as is.

anyone know how to get Debian 9.6 to boot off of cd? I've tried a few commands in OF, none work.

boot cd:,\install\yaboot

basically "cant open device or file".

the file yaboot doesnt exist.


Edit:

nevermind. Looks like ppc64el doesnt run on the G5.

[ Edited by TheMagicM 09.12.2018 - 14:13 ]

> Looks like ppc64el doesnt run on the G5.

Indeed, ppc64le (or ppc64el in Debian parlance) requires at least POWER8. For Debian to run on the G5, see 2nd link in comment #18.

Yea..saw that Andreas. Thanks.

Downloaded Debian 8.11 and Lubuntu 16.10(?). Also downloaded openSUSE Tumbleweed. Looks like openSUSE is a current distro compared to Debian 8.11. Lubuntu is LTS so its current for a little bit longer.

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I have a dual 2GHz G5 with a Radeon 9800 and 4G of memory and it loaded, runs and updates Lubuntu 16.1 PPC without any problems.
I loaded onto a new 240G SanDisk SSD.
This is also my G5 Morph OS machine.

Joe

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I have problems booting... stops at Loading Stage 2...

I'm assuming it has something to do with a newworld partition or something. Just dont know what goes in that partition after I create it.

Quote:
You don't need to to someething with the newworld partition yourself, yaboot does that. You just need a proper /etc/yaboot.conf. Be sure to read man yaboot.conf and man ybin. After editing the yaboot.conf it gets written into the newworld partition via ybin -v. The OF will be updated to boot from this partition.

The "newworld" partition needs to be HFS-formatted and (probably) the boot-flag needs to be set (gparted or parted can do that). The Linux root-filesystem needs to be ext2/ext3/ext4. Though I had problems with ext4 at some point, so I used a seperate ext2-partition with the kernel on it.

@ernsteiswuerfel:

What I did was boot Lubuntu and install it. I assumed it took care of partitioning, yaboot etc. So after it reboots it doesnt work. Looks like I need to do some things manually.

Quote:

I need to correct my earlier post:

"I loaded onto a new 240G SanDisk SSD."

I went back and looked at the drive I used, this was a new SanDisk SSD I had loaded OSX 10.4 on. I put the disk back in the G5, loaded the Lubuntu 16.1 install DVD disk and installed over the OSX installation without any formatting on my part. I assume OSX formatted the disk in a way Lubuntu could use.

Sorry for the mistake.

Joe