Results tagged “PowerPC” from CLICK

Here are the Ubuntu minimal-install images for i386, amd64, 32- and 64-bit PowerPC, and 64-bit SPARC.

I'm surprised there are still images for PowerPC and SPARC, especially since neither of these has an "official" desktop port.

I've taken to calling my Power Macintosh G4/466 the Debian Mac.

I continue to be amazed at how well Debian Etch runs on this thing with 466 MHz of PowerPC CPU and a smallish 128 MB of RAM. (I'll take this opportunity to repeat that on this box, Etch runs many a ring around Fedora 9's PowerPC port).

The best thing I could do for the usability of this box is to up the RAM. It'd be nice to have 512 MB of RAM in here. The box will take up to 1.5 GB, but I have yet to find any PC-133 RAM sticks in my possession that will work.

I had a sweet 512 MB module that, in all fairness, I've never been able to test, and it didn't work in the G4. I had a bunch of smaller modules (32 MB to 128 MB), none of which worked either.

There's a lone 256 MB module in my VIA test box that I might try, but I probably will be reduced to going on eBay and looking for SIMMs that somebody pulled from an existing Mac.

With the huge 22-inch LaCie electron22blue II monitor and, with Debian Etch, a very well-matched OS, this is a really nice box to work on.

If I didn't mention it before (and I know I did), the biggest impediment in using Linux or BSD with a PowerPC-based machine is the lack of Flash support. Since Flash is so insidious and must be written for your exact CPU, which it taxes greatly, by the way, there is a Flash plugin for Mac OS on PowerPC, for Linux on i386, but not for Linux (or OpenBSD) on PowerPC.

You can get around the Flash problem in OpenBSD on i386 by using a Linux browser (I use Opera for that purpose) and OpenBSD's excellent Linux compatibility feature, but there's no easy way to play Flash content in Linux on PowerPC.

I installed swf-dec, but that has yet to do one Flash-y thing for me.

Gnash might work in some situations for PowerPC Linux — and it pretty much represents our only hope for this platform — but it is not part of the Etch distribution, and I'm not desperate enough to backport it.

Actually, if I was convinced that Gnash would work, I'd upgrade to Lenny immediately. But I'd miss a) the stability and b) not having to install 100 updates a week in Etch (like I seem to do on my Lenny laptop).

Coming up: I add a backup drive to the Debian Mac — and create a very simple shell script to facilitate the backups we all should be making ... but only after I fail once again at installing OpenBSD.

I didn't have any complaints about the way Debian Etch performed on my new/old Power Macintosh G4/466. The install went smoothly, the system performed better than I had reason to expect with only 128 MB of RAM, and I can unreservedly recommend Etch to anybody with a box of this pedigree (PowerPC) and vintage (circa 2001).

But since this was my first PowerPC install, I can't leave things where they are without taking a few more distros for a spin.

Right now I'm installing Fedora 9. I've been wanting to try it for awhile, and the fact that it is made for both PowerPC and i386 means it's something I could run on the Mac and my laptop, if I decide to go that way.

Update: I was working the nightshift, and I started the installation about 5 p.m. It was still downloading packages when I left at midnight.

I've had great things to say about the graphical Anaconda installer when I was installing CentOS, but the text-mode version on this Fedora-for-PPC network-install disc could be much better.

I guess if I hadn't done maybe 20 Debian and about as many Ubuntu installs over the past two years, I might look less favorably on the text-based installer for both. But I do look on the Debian installer favorably, as I do the installer for CentOS. So it's not about being overly familiar with Debian and not so much with Fedora.

This text-based installer for Fedora 9 on PowerPC is, for lack of a better word, barbaric.

I'm using the network install ISO, and that meant the packages would come over the Internet. I made the mistake the first time of saying that the packages were on the CD, after which the installer told me that no, there were no packages on the disc. It took me a couple of times to figure out that I had to tell the installer that the packages were indeed coming via network.

Couldn't Anaconda somehow figure out that I'm using the network-install disc?

Once I selected network install, I was prompted for information on my network connection; nothing out of the ordinary there.

But then I had to select a mirror. Unlike the Debian installer, in Fedora you don't get a list from which to choose a mirror. You either have the information written down, or you go to another computer and start digging into the documentation to find a mirror.

I did the latter and finally found a proper mirror.

I'm still not all that experienced in rolling my own partitions in PowerPC, so I let the installer set them up for me. It looks like Fedora's default is to go with logical volume management. This might be a good time for me to get schooled a bit on how to work with LVM.

Once I went forward in the install process and chose the desktop selection of packages, the process began. That was a couple of hours ago, and it looks like it's going to be a long wait for all 920 packages to download and install.

I don't know how well Fedora will perform on the G4 with 128 MB of RAM (I've been meaning to hunt down some more memory ...), and that's where this tale will resume.

My initial elation with Ubuntu 8.04's ability to Suspend/Resume the Gateway Solo 1450 has given way to doubt.

First of all, Suspend/Resume doesn't work all of the time. I've had a few situations where I lose keyboard and mouse/touchpad functionality.

And ... in a very-much-related matter, sometimes the keyboard and mouse or touchpad die for no particular reason.

So the Suspend/Resume problem might be related to the keyboard/mouse issue.

At any rate, I need more reliability, especially because my wife and daughter are using this laptop more and more.

Why? Well, the 4-year-old has all her educational games on here, and Ilene's now-5-year-old iBook G4 is starting to die. It gets really hot and shuts down after a period of use. I think it's the CPU fan, but I have to get my hands on the laptop. First I'll have to find an app that lets me monitor CPU temperature and fan speed on this PowerPC-equipped machine. Then I have to crack the case and get a visual on the fan to see whether or not it's, in fact, spinning at all.

Back to Ubuntu 8.04. I will try to track down what's making the keyboard and mouse fail. It could be that whatever in ACPI that allows Suspend/Resume to work is causing the problem. I'd bet on that.

In Debian Lenny, I don't have Suspend/Resume, and closing the laptop lid leads to a crash (I might have that one fixed, however). But there are no random crashes of X or the box itself. Yep, Debian continues to be rock-solidly reliable. In times of Ubuntu-esq trouble, I always turn to Debian, and I've been running it pretty continuously since Etch came out in April 2007.

I never had a problem on the $0 Laptop with the Slackware 11-based Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0, either. Something to think about.