Mailing List Archive: Installing Gentoo on a Powermac G5

Installing Gentoo on a Powermac G5

Oct 3, 2006, 1:26 PM

Post #1 of 9 (4722 views)

Hello all,

Hardware:
PowerPC G5, dual 2GHz CPUs, 1.5GB RAM

I am no stranger to installing Gentoo, but I have questions that don't appear
to be answered in the PPC64 handbook. I am waiting for a new SATA drive here,
and when it arrives I intend to install Gentoo on it. A few Qs:

1. OS X is on the first sata drive, Gentoo will be on the second. Is it still
necessary to create the 'apple_bootstrap' partition if Gentoo will be on its
own complete disk?

2. If I follow the PPC64 guide does this give me the 64bit userland? If so, is
there enough (hard) unmasked software to use this as a general desktop
machine? Is all software in the package database marked stable under PPC64
64bit userland software? Can I mix and match PPC32 and PPC64 software? Any
and all information on this issue would be most helpful, as I don't think I
completely understand it (I don't have an x86-64 machine so I am mostly
ignorant of 64bit issues).

3. I have the 23 inch Cinema display and a ATI Radeon 9600 Pro vidcard. Are
there drivers that can make this setup work? I ask because I booted the
machine with a Kubuntu PPC livecd to play around and while the cli worked,
when it came time for X to start the screen went black and I was forced to do
a hard reset. I am not sure if this was just a problem with Kubuntu, or some
other reason. I am not too concerned with hardware acceleration or anything,
at most I just want to be able to watch DVDs.

Apropos, if any one has the same, or a similar setup I would love if you could
send me your xorg.conf.

Again, I am very familiar with Gentoo, but have little knowledge of PPC
hardware and 64 bit issues...pointers to docs that explain differences and
ramification on this topic would be great.

Thanks for consideration.
-d
--
darren kirby :: Part of the problem since 1976 :: http://badcomputer.org
"...the number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected..."
- Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, June 1972
--
gentoo-ppc-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: Installing Gentoo on a Powermac G5 [ In reply to ]

david.gurvich at verizon

Oct 3, 2006, 1:52 PM

Post #2 of 9 (4525 views)

Permalink

The video should not be a big problem. If you are going to use xorg-7.1, make
sure to apply the patch to the ati driver. I could not get xorg.conf set up
correctly, until Xorgautoconfig gave me a starting point.

I haven't used ppc64, but many of the developers are doing so. In fact, I've
had to add ppc to ebuilds that had ppc64 in the KEYWORDS, but not ppc. I
don't know about mixing ppc32 and ppc64 apps, but perhaps a chroot
environment such as that used in amd64 might be possible.

On Tuesday 03 October 2006 16:26, darren kirby wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Hardware:
> PowerPC G5, dual 2GHz CPUs, 1.5GB RAM
>
> I am no stranger to installing Gentoo, but I have questions that don't
> appear to be answered in the PPC64 handbook. I am waiting for a new SATA
> drive here, and when it arrives I intend to install Gentoo on it. A few Qs:
>
> 1. OS X is on the first sata drive, Gentoo will be on the second. Is it
> still necessary to create the 'apple_bootstrap' partition if Gentoo will be
> on its own complete disk?
>
> 2. If I follow the PPC64 guide does this give me the 64bit userland? If so,
> is there enough (hard) unmasked software to use this as a general desktop
> machine? Is all software in the package database marked stable under PPC64
> 64bit userland software? Can I mix and match PPC32 and PPC64 software? Any
> and all information on this issue would be most helpful, as I don't think I
> completely understand it (I don't have an x86-64 machine so I am mostly
> ignorant of 64bit issues).
>
> 3. I have the 23 inch Cinema display and a ATI Radeon 9600 Pro vidcard. Are
> there drivers that can make this setup work? I ask because I booted the
> machine with a Kubuntu PPC livecd to play around and while the cli worked,
> when it came time for X to start the screen went black and I was forced to
> do a hard reset. I am not sure if this was just a problem with Kubuntu, or
> some other reason. I am not too concerned with hardware acceleration or
> anything, at most I just want to be able to watch DVDs.
>
> Apropos, if any one has the same, or a similar setup I would love if you
> could send me your xorg.conf.
>
> Again, I am very familiar with Gentoo, but have little knowledge of PPC
> hardware and 64 bit issues...pointers to docs that explain differences and
> ramification on this topic would be great.
>
> Thanks for consideration.
> -d
> --
> darren kirby :: Part of the problem since 1976 :: http://badcomputer.org
> "...the number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more
> expected..." - Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, June 1972

--
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Re: Installing Gentoo on a Powermac G5 [ In reply to ]

josejx at gentoo

Oct 3, 2006, 3:05 PM

Post #3 of 9 (4521 views)

Permalink

darren kirby wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Hardware:
> PowerPC G5, dual 2GHz CPUs, 1.5GB RAM
>
> I am no stranger to installing Gentoo, but I have questions that don't appear
> to be answered in the PPC64 handbook. I am waiting for a new SATA drive here,
> and when it arrives I intend to install Gentoo on it. A few Qs:
>
> 1. OS X is on the first sata drive, Gentoo will be on the second. Is it still
> necessary to create the 'apple_bootstrap' partition if Gentoo will be on its
> own complete disk?

Yes. Open Firmware looks for a HFS blessed partition to boot from,
which is all the apple_bootstrap partition actually is. It contains
a copy of yaboot as well. When ybin runs, it will tell OpenFirmware
to boot from this device (well, that what the nvram write is for.
If your kernel doesn't have nvram support, you'll have to set this
manually). Note that it doesn't really matter which disk this
partition is on, but it's preferred to have it before the OSX
partition so that if OSX resets the nvram, it will be the first
blessed HFS partition found and still boot as normal.

> 2. If I follow the PPC64 guide does this give me the 64bit userland? If so, is
> there enough (hard) unmasked software to use this as a general desktop
> machine? Is all software in the package database marked stable under PPC64
> 64bit userland software? Can I mix and match PPC32 and PPC64 software? Any
> and all information on this issue would be most helpful, as I don't think I
> completely understand it (I don't have an x86-64 machine so I am mostly
> ignorant of 64bit issues).

I can't speak too much for ppc64 (I only have ppc32 machines), but
you have a few options. A pure ppc64 machine won't work with
everything. For instance, there are issues with Mozilla based
applications and ppc64, but KDE (and konqueror) should work great.
You can also run a 32bit UL very easily and for desktop usage this
is the recommended configuration afaik. I'm not sure about a mixed
environment.

> 3. I have the 23 inch Cinema display and a ATI Radeon 9600 Pro vidcard. Are
> there drivers that can make this setup work? I ask because I booted the
> machine with a Kubuntu PPC livecd to play around and while the cli worked,
> when it came time for X to start the screen went black and I was forced to do
> a hard reset. I am not sure if this was just a problem with Kubuntu, or some
> other reason. I am not too concerned with hardware acceleration or anything,
> at most I just want to be able to watch DVDs.

This should work just fine with DRI as well. I have a Radeon 9600
in my PB and it works very nicely with OpenGL acceleration, etc. :)

> Apropos, if any one has the same, or a similar setup I would love if you could
> send me your xorg.conf.

Not really required, just use Xorgautoconfig and it should work
fine. With that display you will probably also need to set the
reduced blanking setting.

> Again, I am very familiar with Gentoo, but have little knowledge of PPC
> hardware and 64 bit issues...pointers to docs that explain differences and
> ramification on this topic would be great.
>
> Thanks for consideration.
> -d

Hope that helped,
-Joe
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gentoo-ppc-user@gentoo.org mailing list

RE: Installing Gentoo on a Powermac G5 [ In reply to ]

bulliver at gmail

Oct 3, 2006, 4:11 PM

Post #4 of 9 (4518 views)

Permalink

Note: Sorry if this shows up twice, but both my responses (to David
and Joseph) seem to have been lost in a black hole...

quoth the David Gurvich:
> The video should not be a big problem. If you are going to use xorg-7.1,
> make sure to apply the patch to the ati driver. I could not get xorg.conf
> set up correctly, until Xorgautoconfig gave me a starting point.

I imagine I will use 7.0. Is putting:

VIDEO_CARDS="radeon"

in make.conf enough to get the drivers I need? Sorry for the stupid questions,
but all my x86 boxes have nVidia cards, and I have never used an ATI card
with Linux...

> I haven't used ppc64, but many of the developers are doing so. In fact,
> I've had to add ppc to ebuilds that had ppc64 in the KEYWORDS, but not ppc.
> I don't know about mixing ppc32 and ppc64 apps, but perhaps a chroot
> environment such as that used in amd64 might be possible.

After going through the package database pretty much all the software I
absolutely require is stable for PPC64, so I guess I'm all good.

-d
--
http://badcomputer.org
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gentoo-ppc-user@gentoo.org mailing list

RE: Installing Gentoo on a Powermac G5 [ In reply to ]

bulliver at gmail

Oct 3, 2006, 4:13 PM

Post #5 of 9 (4521 views)

Permalink

Note: Sorry if this shows up twice, but both my responses (to David
and Joseph) seem to have been lost in a black hole...(Resending from
gmail).

quoth the Joseph Jezak:

> > 1. OS X is on the first sata drive, Gentoo will be on the second. Is it
> > still necessary to create the 'apple_bootstrap' partition if Gentoo will
> > be on its own complete disk?
>
> Yes. Open Firmware looks for a HFS blessed partition to boot from,
> which is all the apple_bootstrap partition actually is. It contains
> a copy of yaboot as well. When ybin runs, it will tell OpenFirmware
> to boot from this device (well, that what the nvram write is for.
> If your kernel doesn't have nvram support, you'll have to set this
> manually). Note that it doesn't really matter which disk this
> partition is on, but it's preferred to have it before the OSX
> partition so that if OSX resets the nvram, it will be the first
> blessed HFS partition found and still boot as normal.

Ok. I suppose I should have explained better. OS X is already installed, so I
imagine the bootstrap partition is already on the OS X disk right? Sorry to
be thick, but you say 'it doesn't matter which disk' it is on, so as long as
it is on one of them that's OK?

I should say here, my SATA drive just arrived an hour ago, and I installed it
and booted OS X, and it seems the drives were reversed, that is, the old disk
is disk 1, and the new one is disk 0. Does this make a difference...

I guess I'll just make the partition anyway, as I don't believe it takes a
whole lot of space.

> > 2. If I follow the PPC64 guide does this give me the 64bit userland? If
> > so, is there enough (hard) unmasked software to use this as a general
> > desktop machine? Is all software in the package database marked stable
> > under PPC64 64bit userland software? Can I mix and match PPC32 and PPC64
> > software? Any and all information on this issue would be most helpful, as
> > I don't think I completely understand it (I don't have an x86-64 machine
> > so I am mostly ignorant of 64bit issues).
>
> I can't speak too much for ppc64 (I only have ppc32 machines), but
> you have a few options. A pure ppc64 machine won't work with
> everything. For instance, there are issues with Mozilla based
> applications and ppc64, but KDE (and konqueror) should work great.
> You can also run a 32bit UL very easily and for desktop usage this
> is the recommended configuration afaik. I'm not sure about a mixed
> environment.

Ok, I see on the mirrors there are PPC64 32 bit UL and 64 bit UL tarballs. To
tell the truth I am planning on using KDE anyway (and I can live without
firefox) , so I think I will give the 64bit a shot. If it doesn't work out
for me I will just do a reinstall. No big whoop. Just playing around for now
anyway.

Just to confirm, the packages in the database that are under PPC64 arch are
the 64 bit userland apps right? I have already checked and everything I
want/need is stable for PPC64...

> > 3. I have the 23 inch Cinema display and a ATI Radeon 9600 Pro vidcard.
> > Are there drivers that can make this setup work? I ask because I booted
> > the machine with a Kubuntu PPC livecd to play around and while the cli
> > worked, when it came time for X to start the screen went black and I was
> > forced to do a hard reset. I am not sure if this was just a problem with
> > Kubuntu, or some other reason. I am not too concerned with hardware
> > acceleration or anything, at most I just want to be able to watch DVDs.
>
> This should work just fine with DRI as well. I have a Radeon 9600
> in my PB and it works very nicely with OpenGL acceleration, etc. :)

Sounds good!

I responded to David's post but it seems to not have made it to the list. In
that post I asked if all I needed to do was add:

VIDEO_CARDS="radeon"

to make.conf to get the drivers I need (assuming xorg 7.0). Is this right?

>
> Hope that helped,
> -Joe

Sure did, thanks a lot,
-d

--
http://badcomputer.org
--
gentoo-ppc-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: RE: Installing Gentoo on a Powermac G5 [ In reply to ]

david.gurvich at verizon

Oct 3, 2006, 4:40 PM

Post #6 of 9 (4528 views)

Permalink

For xorg you need to place the following in make.conf
VIDEO_CARDS="radeon" #Thats for the video driver
INPUT_DEVICES="keyboard mouse" #optionally you could add evdev to test.

If you decide to use xorg-7.1:

The ati driver patch is here for xf86-video-ati-6.6.2.
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=146706
All it does is some sanity checking. Otherwise, the driver assumes an x86
VESA Bios and generates useless values. Developers are waiting on the patch
to see if this or something else is used upstream.
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gentoo-ppc-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: RE: Installing Gentoo on a Powermac G5 [ In reply to ]

josejx at gentoo

Oct 3, 2006, 7:10 PM

Post #7 of 9 (4539 views)

Permalink

David Gurvich wrote:
> For xorg you need to place the following in make.conf
> VIDEO_CARDS="radeon" #Thats for the video driver
> INPUT_DEVICES="keyboard mouse" #optionally you could add evdev to test.
>
> If you decide to use xorg-7.1:
>
> The ati driver patch is here for xf86-video-ati-6.6.2.
> http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=146706
> All it does is some sanity checking. Otherwise, the driver assumes an x86
> VESA Bios and generates useless values. Developers are waiting on the patch
> to see if this or something else is used upstream.

It's also not needed on all ATI cards (works fine here without it),
I'd give it a try before patching.

-Joe
--
gentoo-ppc-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: RE: Installing Gentoo on a Powermac G5 [ In reply to ]

josejx at gentoo

Oct 3, 2006, 7:14 PM

Post #8 of 9 (4513 views)

Permalink

Darren Kirby wrote:
> Note: Sorry if this shows up twice, but both my responses (to David
> and Joseph) seem to have been lost in a black hole...(Resending from
> gmail).
>
> quoth the Joseph Jezak:
>
>> > 1. OS X is on the first sata drive, Gentoo will be on the second. Is it
>> > still necessary to create the 'apple_bootstrap' partition if Gentoo
>> will
>> > be on its own complete disk?
>>
>> Yes. Open Firmware looks for a HFS blessed partition to boot from,
>> which is all the apple_bootstrap partition actually is. It contains
>> a copy of yaboot as well. When ybin runs, it will tell OpenFirmware
>> to boot from this device (well, that what the nvram write is for.
>> If your kernel doesn't have nvram support, you'll have to set this
>> manually). Note that it doesn't really matter which disk this
>> partition is on, but it's preferred to have it before the OSX
>> partition so that if OSX resets the nvram, it will be the first
>> blessed HFS partition found and still boot as normal.
>
> Ok. I suppose I should have explained better. OS X is already installed,
> so I
> imagine the bootstrap partition is already on the OS X disk right? Sorry to
> be thick, but you say 'it doesn't matter which disk' it is on, so as
> long as
> it is on one of them that's OK?
>
> I should say here, my SATA drive just arrived an hour ago, and I
> installed it
> and booted OS X, and it seems the drives were reversed, that is, the old
> disk
> is disk 1, and the new one is disk 0. Does this make a difference...
>
> I guess I'll just make the partition anyway, as I don't believe it takes a
> whole lot of space.

While you could use your OSX partition as a bootstrap partition,
it's really not a good idea. The bootstrap is for Linux only. As I
said before, it's an HFS formatted partition that holds the yaboot
binary that OpenFirmware loads. That's why it's so small. :)

>> > 2. If I follow the PPC64 guide does this give me the 64bit userland? If
>> > so, is there enough (hard) unmasked software to use this as a general
>> > desktop machine? Is all software in the package database marked stable
>> > under PPC64 64bit userland software? Can I mix and match PPC32 and
>> PPC64
>> > software? Any and all information on this issue would be most
>> helpful, as
>> > I don't think I completely understand it (I don't have an x86-64
>> machine
>> > so I am mostly ignorant of 64bit issues).
>>
>> I can't speak too much for ppc64 (I only have ppc32 machines), but
>> you have a few options. A pure ppc64 machine won't work with
>> everything. For instance, there are issues with Mozilla based
>> applications and ppc64, but KDE (and konqueror) should work great.
>> You can also run a 32bit UL very easily and for desktop usage this
>> is the recommended configuration afaik. I'm not sure about a mixed
>> environment.
>
> Ok, I see on the mirrors there are PPC64 32 bit UL and 64 bit UL
> tarballs. To
> tell the truth I am planning on using KDE anyway (and I can live without
> firefox) , so I think I will give the 64bit a shot. If it doesn't work out
> for me I will just do a reinstall. No big whoop. Just playing around for
> now
> anyway.
>
> Just to confirm, the packages in the database that are under PPC64 arch are
> the 64 bit userland apps right? I have already checked and everything I
> want/need is stable for PPC64...

If it's marked ppc64, it'll work on ppc64, the 32 bit UL uses the
ppc keyword, just like the PPC32.

>> > 3. I have the 23 inch Cinema display and a ATI Radeon 9600 Pro vidcard.
>> > Are there drivers that can make this setup work? I ask because I booted
>> > the machine with a Kubuntu PPC livecd to play around and while the cli
>> > worked, when it came time for X to start the screen went black and I
>> was
>> > forced to do a hard reset. I am not sure if this was just a problem
>> with
>> > Kubuntu, or some other reason. I am not too concerned with hardware
>> > acceleration or anything, at most I just want to be able to watch DVDs.
>>
>> This should work just fine with DRI as well. I have a Radeon 9600
>> in my PB and it works very nicely with OpenGL acceleration, etc. :)
>
> Sounds good!
>
> I responded to David's post but it seems to not have made it to the
> list. In
> that post I asked if all I needed to do was add:
>
> VIDEO_CARDS="radeon"
>
> to make.conf to get the drivers I need (assuming xorg 7.0). Is this right?

Yes, that should do it. The PPC FAQ has more detailed directions
for configuring your kernel as well.

-Joe
--
gentoo-ppc-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: RE: Installing Gentoo on a Powermac G5 [ In reply to ]

dostrow at gentoo

Oct 4, 2006, 11:00 AM

Post #9 of 9 (4517 views)

Permalink

On Tue, 2006-10-03 at 22:10 -0400, Joseph Jezak wrote:
> David Gurvich wrote:
> > For xorg you need to place the following in make.conf
> > VIDEO_CARDS="radeon" #Thats for the video driver
> > INPUT_DEVICES="keyboard mouse" #optionally you could add evdev to test.
> >
> > If you decide to use xorg-7.1:
> >
> > The ati driver patch is here for xf86-video-ati-6.6.2.
> > http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=146706
> > All it does is some sanity checking. Otherwise, the driver assumes an x86
> > VESA Bios and generates useless values. Developers are waiting on the patch
> > to see if this or something else is used upstream.
>
> It's also not needed on all ATI cards (works fine here without it),
> I'd give it a try before patching.

As of around 16 hours ago version 6.6.3 of the driver hit the tree that
seems to fix the open issues.

--Dan

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