>> 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.

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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.

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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

Anyone have instructions on how to install Fenix on a G5?

I have tried some distributions, no way to get pcie x1900 to work with linux

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^^^^ anyone...anyone... Bueller...Bueller... lmao

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What problems did you have, eg. not booting at all, freezing as soon as drm loads, freezing as soon as X starts? Most part of the problem is which version of the kernel and mesa the distro does run.

On the PCIe G5 (11,2) I had problems with kernel versions 4.10.x - 4.17.x. Since 4.18.x (or on 4.9.x) the PCIe Radeon HD 5450 and the Geforce 6600 run just fine in my G5 11,2.

[ Editiert durch ernsteiswuerfel 16.12.2018 - 15:57 ]

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The problem is the openfirmware rom on the video board. I not found any linux distro if the bug is fixed! All distribution assume you have a x86 bios on the board. But the x1900 mac edition not have a x86 bios....

In practice if you use a frame buffer you have the colors corrupted (little endian vs big endian), if you use the radeon driver the screen remain black.

The only option is: "radeon.modeset=0" and text console.

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Ok, so it's the kernels drm driver which is not working. I suggest you download a recent 4.19.x kernel and build from source. And it would be a good thing if your distribution uses gcc 6.4/6.5.

I don't think the problem is the card having a Mac-BIOS. All my AGP-Cards and the NVIDIA in the G5 11,2 run just fine with Mac-BIOS.

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Yes, the nvidia work good. The problem is the Radeon x1900....

Code:

> Void Linux has been ported to PPC
> https://forum.voidlinux.org/t/porting-void-to-powerpc/6228

Progress:

https://github.com/void-ppc64 (project site)
https://void-ppc64.octaforge.org (repository)

Interesting!

Though only the musl little/big-endian variant would be of interest to the G5 and the majority of 'our' PPC machines. ppc64le is >=POWER8.

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Ok, you were right! It looks like the r400 driver really does not like a non-x86 BIOS. What kernel is this distro running? uname -a from a shell tells you that.

Only chance would be to run/build a more recent kernel. If that does not work out you can file a bug at that xorg bug tracker for "Driver/Radeon" (klick). Sometimes even PPC bugs get some care.

> only the musl little/big-endian variant would be of interest to the G5
> and the majority of 'our' PPC machines. ppc64le is >=POWER8.

Little-endian musl is also ppc64le and thus requires POWER8 or later. The only variant running on 'our' machines is the big-endian musl one, and requiring 64-bit it only runs on PowerMac G5 (and would run on Cyrus / AmigaOne X5000 if its packages weren't compiled for AltiVec/VMX). The majority of 'our' machines is 32-bit so Void Linux for PPC64 is void for them ;-)

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True. AFAIK only Adelie, Gentoo and Debian Ports remain then.

Lately I've grown quite fond of Adelie. Installing packages is easy and very fast, the software stack is modern, several desktop options available (Xfce4. lxqt, KDE). Downsides: not very well documented besides basic installation (packages necessary to reach the desktop), no properly working display manager available yet. Also yaboot is not available - and GRUB is not able to boot the MorphOS kernel (I would be gladly proven wrong here). But you can work around these glitches and installing it is a lot faster than Gentoo/Debian.

Update:

> The only variant running on 'our' machines is the big-endian musl one

Now also big-endian glibc variant:
https://twitter.com/octaforge/status/1121945675267289088

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Interesting! Thanks for pointing out. Though they only do seem to support 64bit PPC, not the 32bit ones?

> they only do seem to support 64bit PPC, not the 32bit ones?

This particular effort is 64-bit only, yes. There's also a separate 32-bit effort even predating the 64-bit one, see comment #14 for the link to the respective thread in the Void Linux forum (which is still down, unfortunately).

More links:
https://twitter.com/FoxletFox/status/1022365071320772608
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/void-linux-for-powerpc.2129245/

@octaforge here; I was made aware of this thread, so if you have any questions, go ahead

Yes, my effort is only 64bit, but there are other people (seems to be a collective work of foxlet and stenstorp, with the latter having picked it up in recent time) doing the 32bit work. It is also upstream, but has no binary packages.

My 64bit work has unofficial binary packages made by me. I'm doing both little endian and big endian, and for each of those now both glibc and musl libcs. The big endian stuff works on anything starting with PowerPC 970 aka G5 (as long as it has altivec, which means sadly y'all's X5000s are out, sorry, couldn't make that sacrifice - you could still compile it yourself, xbps-src makes it easy to build the entire OS from scratch, even cross-compile it from an x86_64 or ppc64le or ppc64 machine, all you have to do is change the cflags; Adélie has the same restriction, it too requires altivec, OTOH X1000 could work, i think I think the PWRfficient SoCs do have altivec), the little endian stuff works on the usual machines starting with POWER8 or equivalent (NXP e6500 should still work, that's full ISA 2.07 i believe).

The glibc libc port for big endian is unusual because it uses the new ELFv2 ABI. Every other big endian ppc64 distro that still has support typically sticks with ELFv1, but Void is legacy-free in this regard (we're early adopters of ELFv2 in BE glibc, I don't think it even worked properly until fairly recently). That means older binaries won't work as they are, but of course you can always make like a Debian chroot/container to run your older binaries in. The kernel is ABI agnostic.

I have a powerful 18-core POWER9 server here, which will be in the future used for official builds (as long as it works out) and before that for the unofficial builds. I plan to lend it to doing the 32bit builds as well later, as long as there is enough disk space and so on. The 32bit stuff don't require altivec, they run on the G3s.

hopefully that clears it up