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April 11, 2020
New ISO images
The old batch was starting to show its age, so there are now some fresh ISOimages. There are also some significant improvements in them. They are marked20200411. Of course, fresh rootfs tarballs are also included.
My original testbed was a Late 2005 2.3 GHz Power Mac G5 Dual with 3 GB of RAM and two hard drives, one with OS X 10.4 Tiger, the other with OS X 10.5 Leopard.It’s my most powerful PowerPC Mac, so I figured it would be a good way to take Linux for a spin. Getting the Revival on for Your PowerPC Mac Running Linux. What you need to get started depends on what type of optical drive you have in your G4- or G5-based PowerBook or Mac.
As usual, they are available in ppc64le (POWER8+), ppc64 (G5+) and ppc(generic) variants, with glibc and musl both supported.
Let’s see: Nas hard drive for mac and pc.
Serial console support
There is now support for serial console integrated in the images, so you don’tnecessarily need a monitor and/or go through a bunch of hoops to manually setup the serial console. All you need to do is append some things on the kernelcommand line.
For example, on a Talos 2/Blackbird/qemu-system-ppc64:
The first will get you a monitor as usual, the second the serial console.Keep in mind that it has to be last! There is a special hook in the liveinitramfs that sets up the respective agetty services.
Dual kernels for big endian
Since some Macs have trouble booting on recent 5.x kernels, we’re now shippinga 4.4 LTS kernel as an alternative to the primary (currently 5.4) one. Youcan choose between them in the bootloader. So if you have one of thoseaffected machines, you can at least get the installer booted.
Keep in mind that with a network installation you’ll get the default kernelagain. The installer gives you an option to drop into the installed systembefore rebooting. You can install a kernel of your choice there.
Bootstrap partition validation in installer
Since a bunch of people complained about the installer booting fine but thefinal system not being bootable and the issue turned out to be swappedparameter order when creating the bootstrap partition on their Mac (andtherefore the partition having an incorrect type), the installer now checkswhether the partition is correct and tells you ahead if it’s not.
Yaboot shipped in the ISOs
If you’re one of those really unlucky people who can’t get GRUB to load andthere is no workaround (such one of those described in the FAQ), you can nowuse yaboot to boot the image. The default is obviously GRUB, but you canbring it up manually, e.g.:
Of course, that doesn’t mean yaboot is supported in the installer; it’s stillold and obsolete, and doesn’t play nice with the rest of the system (and thusrequires manual maintenance). However, it allows you to get the ISO booted,install the system without having it set up the bootloader, and set it upafterwards by hand.
Fewer graphical flavor images
Since generating all those graphical flavor images took way too long, neededa ton of space, and some of them didn’t even work for various reasons, we areno longer shipping graphical flavors with the exception of Xfce. Keep in mindthat this only applies to the live images! You can still install thedesktop environment of your choice in the final system, of course.
Other minor stuff
Linux Mac Ppc G5
The graphical flavor images for 32-bit PowerPC now ship Xorg drivers forRage 128 (r128) and Rage Pro (mach64). This could help some G3s andso on, but do keep in mind that it won’t likely start up out of the box,as the drivers always needed manual configuration (Xorg modelines, etc.)
There have also been assorted fixes in the installer, such as simpler andmore robust code that takes care of setting up the NVRAM stuff to make Voidboot as the default OS. And obviously, the software stack is fresh and updated.
That’s it for now. Grab a copy from the Download page, and test it if you havethe hardware. Any issues go into the bug tracker as always, and we have an IRCchannel as well (#voidlinux-ppc on Freenode).
Linux For Ppc Mac G5 Shortcut
Next batch will come once enough crucial fixes have accumulated, or once itstarts getting dated again.