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Linux Software

LinuxPPC 2000 - First Boxed Product 169

Posted by CmdrTaco from the way-to-go-guys dept.
Hacksworth writes "LinuxPPC, Inc. has released their first boxed product of their distribution of Linux for PowerPC computers. " Congrats to the guys working there. A lot of hard work has been put in over at LinuxPPC and it's nice to see the progress.
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LinuxPPC 2000 - First Boxed Product More

LinuxPPC 2000 - First Boxed Product

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  • Re:Here's SOMETHING to run it on (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This stuff is somewhat expensive, but if you're looking for a PPC box made by someone other than Apple and capable of running LinuxPPC take a look at: Total Impact mPower systems [totalimpact.com]
  • I bought LinuxPPC 1999 knowing that it was ...interesting to get running, because I'd already downloaded it and installed it from my HD. :)

    I haven't got around to reinstalling it (which I intend to do for fun, having a definite geek gene), but it is much nicer not having to download for 48 hours or so and take up whole HD partitions :) plus I've already worked out the kernel I need to run, which apparently is "vmlinux.2.2.1-VERY-STABLE". So I have a head start at wrestling '99 into useful shape and playing with it.

    The packaging for LinuxPPC 1999 is small but _very_ attractive! And ya gotta love that tripped-out-penguin 'Linux Power' graphic. Yow. It looks stunned to be running on a PPC, but nevertheless getting into it ;)

  • It has OpenSSH 1.2.2 and OpenSSL 0.9.6, iirc.
  • More importantly, we gave LinuxOne a 1999Q3 CD at MacWorld SF recently (Yes, they were there for some reason).
  • Um, not really. For one it's a kernel issue, and any kernel works anywhere (BenH's, which LPPC 2k is using, working on debian, lppc, ydl and anybody elses dist for that matter) Also, the original, Well it's booting, was done long before YDL did any sort of patching.
  • I'd like to second the comment about Debian; it was a little rocky getting going at first, but gnome-apt _really works_. And it seems to work a lot better than linuxppc when installed. The guys at LinuxPPC are very cool; I just wish they would use debian as a base instead!
  • I haven't seen any ISO images over at ftp.linuxppc.org yet... but I'm figuring $20 to help the cause isn't a bad idea anyway.
  • I ordered the previous version last night and it looks like I'll be getting PPC 2000. Sweet. Linux on an iMac. I'll be loving it.
  • You're displaying your ignorance.

    a) The default installation of LinuxPPC has no inetd servers enabled. It doesn't get much more secure...

    b) You have now and have always had the option to install with the RedHat installer (rather than the graphical one).

    And considering that there were almost no differences at all between LinuxPPC 1999 and YDL CS 1.1, it's hard for YDL to be "more straightforward and easier to use."
  • I think you'll find that all of the packages in LinuxPPC 2000 are significantly more up to date (performace, bug fixes, features...) than CS 1.1 (or LinuxPPC 1999), which is to be expected in any newer release.
  • You can do that much. What you can't do is resize partitions.

    Actually, FWB has a semi-solution, their Hard Disk Toolkit program (the personal edition's not too expensive, and it comes with just about every Mac hard drive out there).

    It can only shrink partitions, not grow them, unfortunately. Well, it can make a partition bigger if it had been previously shrunk, and there's ways to cheat around this limit. But it's still no PartitionMagic.
  • I believe the old RedHat-style installer is still present (I know it can still be used if you prefer that method of installation). But for 99% of the Linux-using population, the GUI installer is enough, and it's always good to have things be a little easier, if only because it's more convenient.
  • What version of Toast were you using? For the longest time I'd heard that Toast couldn't support ISO images. As it is I'm stuck with 3.5 for the moment, and I'd like to know if I can use Toast with the ISO before I download the image...
  • I have a friend who recieved a beta version of the LinuxPPC 2000. His experience is that it is a much nicer install than the 1999 version.

    I have installed the 1999 versions and I hope so. I really hate to say it, but it was the most painful Linux install I have ever had to do. (And I have been using Linux since the 0.96 days.)

    pdisk is a tool that fits its name. (And just what your dirty mind though of it the first time you saw that name.) It takes all of the power of fdisk and hides it by changing most everything and making the most simple tasks difficult. Want to make a 100 meg partition for swap? Better get out that calculator because you will need to figure out the number of blocks yourself. None of those wimpy shortcuts here!

    If it was hard for me to get working, you can imagine what this must be like for the average Mac user. I was brough in to do the install because the normally clued Mac consultant could not get it to work properly.

    The PowerPC is almost an afterthought in the Linux world and it should not be. Mac users are just as captive to proprietary OSes as Intel users. Maybe even more so. Hopefully that will change. Hopefully, the LinuxPPC 2000 version is that step.

  • Re:A q. (Score:2)

    by haaz ( 3346 )
    I wish! No, the partitioner will only do what pdisk can do -- create, destroy, rename, plus a few tricks it can't do like change partition type. There's nothing that can dynamically repartition for MacOS AFAIK. (Hey FWB! ;-)

  • Re:A q. (Score:2)

    by haaz ( 3346 )
    I wish! No, the partitioner will only do what pdisk can do -- create, destroy, rename, plus a few tricks it can't do like change partition type. There's nothing that can dynamically repartition for MacOS AFAIK. (Hey FWB! ;-)

  • BootX is definately easier for new users. I now have my 1998 PowerBook G3 set up to boot directly from the /boot partition on its hard drive, though.

    It's sweet. Push the power button, see Tux appear, watch kernel load, log in. Yes!

    This works on all supported (PCI) power macs AFAIK. The pre-iMac machines use a system called miBoot, which is a little less flexible than the yaboot program the iMac/BlueG3/G4/iBook/ Lombard PBG3 can use. But it works.

    Loving life,
  • Are there ISO images anywhere? I've been unable to find them, and they're soooooo much nicer than downloading all the packages even with rsync, etc.

    It might almost be worth the $20 just to get them on two bootable CDROMs rather than building my own (which is a piece of cake with RedHat).
    -
  • That doesn't sound promising but, then I never got anything useful from their email support, either. Hopefully this will go smoother than the 1999 release, which went out with a number of egregious bugs that really should have been caught.

    Having complained about them, though, I have to say that both my R5 systems run beautifully, once I got over the install hurdles (160+ days uptime on the server behind me) and that I'm extremely impressed with how productive they are with limited resources. They bit off a tremendous amount for the R4 to R5 transition, which created delays and some growing pains but they've positioned themselves really strongly for the future. I'll keep buying full-price CD's from them because it's a bargain at twice the price.
  • That paragraph is just specifically about mac-on-linux

    I don't know about the first poster, but I had misunderstood that to refer to the whole distro. Sorry about that, LinuxPPC...
  • Well shouldn't Darwin take care of 2 and 3?
  • Au contraire, OF on the PowerTower Pro (in my case, the 225) isn't broken. Well, it is kind of, but you can still get it to work.

    I had to configure things in the blind, and probably couldn't tell anyone how to do it, but it CAN be done.

    That said, I just use BootX. It's really a nice piece of software.

    - Jeff A. Campbell
    - VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])
  • I guess some people define stupidity in a different way. You can bang your head against a nail to drive it in, but I think that's kind of stupid: I'd much rather use a hammer.

    Which person would you consider more intelligent? The one who finished nailing stuff in an hour ago, or the guy with a bloody forehead passed out on the floor?

    I'm a big fan of intuitive, well designed user interfaces. As long as they don't needlessly sacrifice power and efficiency, then there is no harm - UNLESS of course you have more elitest motives, such as being able to call others stupid and make yourself out to be some sort of uber-geek. In that case, your mileage may vary somewhat. Just please, don't bleed on the floor.

    - Jeff A. Campbell
    - VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])
  • ---
    I'd like to check this out, but I'm not going to use anything with the Apple logo on it.
    ---

    Seems like a user issue to me. Apple makes pretty good hardware, albeit for somewhat high prices. Plus, if you ever need it, you are able to run MacOS on it. If that's not a bonus for you that's fine I guess, but I don't imagine you'll get much better of a price on a 3rd party machine simply because they don't sell in volume like Apple does. Why does it matter if it has an Apple logo on it if it's the best supported PPC machine out there?

    ---
    Is there any development here? Or can we just drop the pretense and declare that the Mac -IS- the PPC platform, and that's all it'll ever be
    ---

    Technically right now, there aren't many options. If you're stuck on not buying Apple hardware, you may be interested in this:

    http://www.linuxppc.co m/press/index.php3?archive=totalimpact [linuxppc.com]

    You'll have to wait a few months at the very least.

    - Jeff A. Campbell
    - VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])

  • Re:One interesting thing about this (Score:3)

    by Darchmare ( 5387 ) on Monday February 14, 2000 @05:54PM (#1275949)
    You won't get an answer, because you're right.

    The first argument was that Apple didn't want to lower sales of MacOS, but that didn't hold water. Apple sells boxes anyhow (running MacOS or Linux), and that's where they make their money.

    Then, people said Apple had a past of proprietary hardware and software. More or less true, but then Darwin joined MkLinux and LinuxPPC on the platform. Oddly enough, a certain Jean-Louis Gassee happened to be the main proponent of closed systems at his time at Apple. When he left, Macs started becoming more expandable and began using more standard hardware.

    This isn't even mentioning a certain investment by Intel in Be. Did that have anything to do with their current policy regarding PPC? Maybe not. Either way, Be has handled it TERRIBLY. If they didn't find enough marketshare in the PowerPC space, they should have come outright and said so, instead of blaming Apple or letting Be/PPC customers wonder if they would be supported or not.

    ...of course, now Be is abandoning their desktop market entirely (except as a development platform for their IAs), and the cycle continues, leaving even more desktop users in the cold. Oops.

    (note: Be's software is superb, and their coders are anything but incompetant. This is an internal politics issue, not a technical one. I wager they could have BeOS running on a G3/G4 within 2 weeks maximum)


    - Jeff A. Campbell
    - VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])

  • Yay! (Score:1)

    by XenoWolf ( 6057 )
    Cool! Now we can start seeing boxed Linux distros sitting next to Mac OS 9 in stores! I'm psyched! I've been tinkering with LinuxPPC for about a year and I like what they're doing. Keep up the good work!
  • Debian for PPC does, so I don't see why it wouldn't (most packages seem to rely on the existence of RH packages from my brief play with LinuxPPC). LinuxPPC is nice, though; automagically dealt with a lot of crap (console settings, xmodmap etc) that Debian didn't. And hey, I like the RH boot messages in colour, too ;)

    Tried it on my 7300/180 and was very impressed. Dying to get it on the G3. Debian has quake-lib-stub packages for PPC, but I thought linux quake was only available for x86 - any ideas?
  • <p>AFAIK it's currently a 256 meg limit for memory hard coded in the PowerPC Kernel (with an define), and can not be changed by a kernel argument. The reason for this, was one of the kernel hackers felt that more then 256 megs of RAM caused stablity on many PowerPC Linux machines. Once this problem was fixed it is to be remove.

    <p>See the linuxppc-user list for were this is found (I have forgetten already).
  • <p>BootX works correctly on my machine running 7.5.3. It is suppost to support all 7.5 and newer Macs, and will probably stay that way since their is no real reason to change this.

    <p>At any rate, any Mac that can run System 7.5/7.6 (both 3 years+ old) should be able to boot using open firmware / quik, so you really don't have to use BootX at all.
  • This is great news and the discussion so far has been also great. As a LinuxPPC user, I always cringe when an Apple related story gets posted here. I'll going to buy this product as I do want to support the folks at LinuxPPC. Hopefully, the T-shirts will be available in five fruity colors.:-)

    This is slightly OT, but I was wondering if somebody has a helpful answer to a question concerning big/little endian. At work, we run a mixture of HP's, SGI's, Sun's, and Intel-based Linux workstations; the linux are a relatively new addition. We also have a lot of our data stored in binary format (shorts, ints, floats, and doubles). Needless to say, the X86 linux computers have had problems with the binary data generated on the other nix boxes. I have mentioned to the pro-x86 crowd that using LinuxPPC on a mac would be nice, but I'm woefully outvoted in this regard.

    What is the best solution to this problem? All my code has been converted to use xdr so I don't have any problems. But is there another better solution to this (and no, converting to ascii is not an acceptable solution).

    Anyway, congrats to LinuxPPC. Can't wait to see a LinuxoOnePPC in the future.:-)

  • it's a shame that the PowerPC port is a second class citizen

    How's that? The PPC is in the kernel tree, there are several commercial and non-commercial distributors. What's missing?

    It's even more of a shame that the only released distributions for PowerPC are RedHat derivatives

    I thought Debian's port was in full release now. SuSE is on the way. And don't forget NetBSD....

  • compiler? (Score:3)

    by Signal 11 ( 7608 ) on Monday February 14, 2000 @11:49AM (#1275956)
    Okay, my question is simple - what's the compiler technology like for PPC? Is gcc highly optimized for it? For x86 gcc is great - but for other architectures, it seems lacking (alpha comes to mind).

    Since the compiler is key to speed on a linux platform.. how good is gcc support now with the PPC instructions?

  • Man, I just installed YDL [yellowdoglinux.com] CS1.1...looks like I'll be getting LPPC2K! With the built-in Mac-On-Linux [ibrium.se] support (I'm having trouble with MOL on YDL), RH6.1, and the GUI installer, I'm wicked impressed.
  • Damned fine advice. I tend to get caught up in the heat of the moment, switching OSs at the drop of a hat. :) Thank you, sir.
  • I remmeber getting a few of those in at a (very) former jobsite. "Hey look ! A cable-ready Mac ! With a remote !" Very handy for watching TV while the backups ran.
  • Be careful there, I searched on Deja.com earlier today, and found reports of problems if you mount the image before burning it if you're using OS 9. I just burned an .iso about 15 minutes ago, I DID NOT mount the image first, I just selected Disc Image as the type of CD I wanted to make, then I drug the .iso file onto the data area of the window, and blammo, I churned out both a Corel Linux and a Linux Mandrake CD in no time flat, and they both work. This was using toast on a B&W G3.
    ---
  • Man, this must be a record of some kind.

    I ordered LinuxPPC 1999Q3 for my 7200/75 and an ADSL line from Bell Atlantic at the same time last year.

    Linux came. I installed it (Just make sure that you RTFI TWICE before you think you can install it. There's a "gotcha" for all those who skip the instructions. But apart from that its great.) I hooked it up to my home LAN to my other Macs and the occasional PC Laptop and iBook, got to play with it (its greal BTW), took a course in e-business, found clients, installed shopping carts and the databases to drive them, and now LinuxPPC2K is here and I'm going to buy and install it.

    AND I"M STILL WAITING FOR BELL-ATLANTIC TO DELIVER THE #&$^%#& ADSL LINE.

    Hey man, I'm Pissed! I should be sucking up pages from an ADSL fat pipe through my Linux server and instead I'm sipping through a 56k modem (HA! Like it ever hits that,) straw on my G3.

    But LinuxPPC is just great. I wholeheartedly recommend it over committing your older Macs and iMacs to the landfill. :-)

  • Mac On Linux pondering... (Score:3)

    by Lord Kano ( 13027 ) on Monday February 14, 2000 @11:49AM (#1275962) Homepage Journal
    According to that release, the MOL support requires you to obtain a MacOS ROM file. They include a ROM grabbing util, but they also say that MacOS 8.6 and higher CDs have a MacOS ROM file on them, my question is this. Will this allow the use of MacOS on CHRP systems? Or any other Non-Apple, but supported by LinuxPPC machine?

    LK
  • I am curious as to what exactly the new boot process is, but i will tell you that you NEVER needed a mac os partition for linuxppc to happily boot. All you need to do is set the Open Firmware boot settings to whatever ext2 partition you want, and OF will handle it all for you. The way to do this is very extensively, if somewhat confusingly, documented at www.linuxppc.org.

    They suggest you use BootX because it is the easiest way, not becuase it is the only one. You could always write a LILOish boot switcher in Forth (very difficult), or choose your OS to boot into through using the Boot Variables app, or typing raw Open Firmware commands at the OF command line. Of course, none of these ways is particularly easy at _all_, and if you are unlucky enough to have one of the early PCI macs-- say, the 7200-- you will have no display drivers in the OF. meaning that you will be typing commands into a command line interface you cannot see. Which is not fun, even though the "commands" are likely to just be a one-line boot command.
    The crucial line is, i think, "And you don't have to be a programmer to be able to use the new software." This is a major step-- whatever this new boot process they've come up with is, if it doesn't require you to wait for the macos to boot its basic stuff like bootx does, and it doesn't require you to read ten pages of technically-oriented documentation like the OF methods do, and doesn't vary from machine to machine like the OF methods do.. well, that's a very good thing.

  • MacOS is .. um .. nice for its intended uses, and I wouldn't dream of flaming it. :-) But the fact is, if you're not going to run MacOS, then it's wasteful to buy a Mac, since MacOS' amortized development cost is certainly factored into the price.

    So where the [expletive] is POP?!? How many more years is Motorola going to let x86 keep marketshare uncontested? Sheesh, Motorola! If you build it, they will come!


    ---

  • Ah, I thought the holdup was over some support chips (memory controller?) from Motorola.

    I'll give you a scooby snack if you'll ship me a POP box.

    Would you do it for two scooby snacks? Three scooby snacks?

    "Rokay!"

    That's the spirit!


    ---

  • Road Apples (Score:3)

    by Sloppy ( 14984 ) on Monday February 14, 2000 @12:24PM (#1275966) Homepage Journal

    I have an old 6300 sitting around, same problem. It used to be in my dad's closet, and I said, "Hey, gimme that dusty PowerMac, I'll stick some Unix on it and use it as a firewall." Everything I've tried to do with this box has resulted in failure. Running Linux or BSD is out of the question because it's so screwed up, and even adding Ethernet (and getting it to work under MacOS) is gonna be a bitch.

    Here's a nice list of Mac models to avoid [lowendmac.com], including your 5300 and my 6300. These are the worst boxes Apple ever made. No future at all. Depressing. *sigh*


    ---
  • The page says it's just a boot from CD & graphical install. Doesn't seem like it'd be an issue.
  • So what's the story with the Java 2 platform on PowerPC? I recall that Sun dumped it when they wrested the Linux Java efforts from Blackdown a few months ago...
  • Ease of use =! stupidity.

    Ease of use just makes the hard jobs easier to do. This is not a bad thing because it brings home users. With home users come commercial applications (like games) for the rest of us to use. And it also saves some poor souls from having to use Windows. :)

  • BeOS does not run on the PowerMac G3s and above (read: anything with color on the case) and Be has discontinued development for the PowerPC because Apple is keeping the hardware specs closed, which makes it mighty hard for developers. I have been using Linux\PPC / MkLinux for about 3 years now and have seen it grow from "Let's see if we can make this work" to "Let's see how well we can make this work" to "Damn, let's kick some ass." Keep up the good work. :)
  • Is the partitioner able to reorganise existing partitions without requiring them to be removed, like PartitionMagic?
  • Whether you call it Firwire , IEEE 1394 or iLink, (I personally like Firewire) I would like to know whether support for this technology has been added to Linux, or whether there is project committed to this?
  • Whether you call it Firwire, IEEE 1394 or iLink (I personally like Firewire) I would like to know whether support for this technology has been added to Linux, or whether there is project committed to this?
  • been using my Kensington Turbomouse, No problem. I set it up in WindowMaker, works real nice. G3/266 running LPPCQ3 and OS8.6.

    I will upgrade, may even spring for the Tee shirt. My wife would look good in it. :))
  • I've got a 5300, and sit in the same sorry situation. Well, until I discovered that all hope is not lost for some form of Unix on these Macs! The answer, of course, is MacMiNT (MiNT is Not TOS). This is a port of the MiNT OS for Ataris to the 68k Mac. Suprisingly, it runs fine on PowerMacs, too... Apple did an amazing job with 68k emulation. The only catch is this: it hasn't been updated since 1994. It includes gcc-2.5.8. No network support... but since it runs inside the MacOS that's not really a problem. It's slow as mollasses on my PB5300, too... but it's better than no compiler at all! I guess... Oh well, just thought I'd point out it's existence. Do a search on Google or something, you'll turn it up eventually.

  • Your G3 has the newer (good) firmware. Check out this page [apple.com] for a list of the versions in Power Computing computers. I'm sure there is more info at the apple tech info library [apple.com] about other computers.

    (When you're looking at the chart, version 1.0.5 is the "broken" one. 2.0 should work fine.)

    Also, as a general rule, anything after (or at least as recent as) the G3 will boot without problems through OF.

  • I could figure out why both Yellow Dog and LinuxPPC cause my powerbook to forget it has an extra 128 megs of ram... After rebooting, it goes away. I can't explain it, but if I got back to macos for a week or so, it will suddenly recognize it again... This is the only thing that actually keeps me from using linux on my powerbook...
  • No, that won't address the problem per se... When i boot into Linux, it works fine and recognizes my 160 megs of ram (32 stock + 128 meg chip). It's all happy until I boot into MacOS for something, at which time MacOS recognizes only the built in 32 megs. Booting back into linux, I have 32... After spending about a week in MacOS without booting into linux at all, a reboot brings back all my memory. Like I said, it doesn't make much sense to me...
  • I ended up purchasing the LinuxPPC CD because I couldn't get the downloaded stuff to work right. (this was LinuxPPC 1999 with all the installer problems) but I'm not sorry to have spent a little cash for the CD. It arrived very rapidly and has been working flawlessly both at home (on an old PowerComputing PowerWave) and at work (on a PowerMac 7200/120). I plan to buy the 2000 version as well. (I was cheap and didn't get the free upgrade)
  • Umm, how is OF "broken"? I remember hearing about OF and thinking how cool that would be.

    Some Powermacs don't have support for graphics inside Open Firmware, which means you have to configure it through a serial terminal. Others kindly put the Open Firmware framebuffer in the same place that the kernel gets loaded into (I've seen at least one APUS that did this). None of them seem overly happy about booting off floppy (the first 4 times it won't work. Then it'll work. Then it won't work again for three weeks, then it'll work every time you try it over a two month period. Then it'll stop again. No matter how new the disk, or how much it's been tested as being good.).

    However, they have the astonishingly wonderful feature that holding down the "N" key during boot causes the Mac to TFTP a file off a server and execute it. If you make this file a second-stage loader of some sort (YaBoot, for instance) then you can boot Linux over the network without having to touch the local hard drive. Grab a root file system over NFS and you have wonderful X terminals that double up as Macs. The main problem once you reach that stage is that the mice Apple ship are absolutely dreadful...
  • What in the world does this have to do with the poster's question about whether gcc is optimized for PowerPC?
  • gcc (egcs anyway) has the best optimizing compiler for the PowerPC architecture.
  • You're impressed...? ...that someone ported RedHat 6 to the PowerPC kernel? Big deal.

    Yellow Dog is directly derived from LinuxPPC... big deal again.

    If you want a real Linux on PowerPC, Debian will be ready soon.

    Of course, you could bite down and try NetBSD.
  • > to choose an operating sytem that works on both PowerMac and x86 hardware.

    Aren't we forgetting NetBSD?

    True, you can't buy it off the shelf most places, but it's been running on more different platforms (including PowerPC and Intel) for quite a while now.
  • There are good reasons to run alternativee operating systems on Macs:

    1. You have a Mac that's too old to run a recent MacOS.

    2. You have a Mac you want to use as a server. This could be any Mac you might already have, or it could be a shiny new G4. G4s make incredible servers. :-)

    3. You need to run software that runs on a unix, but not on MacOS.

    4. You want to just install an OS and be done with it, instead of having to drive yourself crazy dealing with flakey hardware components that don't like each other.

    There are plenty of others, but those are the highlights.
  • 1999 was just as easy to install as any version of RedHat for Alpha or Intel.

    Yes, it's a shame that the PowerPC port is a second class citizen. It's even more of a shame that the only released distributions for PowerPC are RedHat derivatives.
  • If you want NetBSD in the first place, you probably couldn't care less whether you can have MacOS on the same drive or not anyway.
  • Wasn't there recently a big flap about people tweaking Quake source code to build cheats into the client?

    Or was that a different version?

    Anyway, some Quake has source code available. From there it's simply a matter of porting.
  • Apologies if this is a dumb question, but have you tried setting your "mem=" boot parameter?

    Check out /usr/doc/HOWTO/BootPrompt-HOWTO section 3.3.1. You should be able to put something like 'append="mem=256M"' in your default LILO setup. Supposedly Linux believes anything you put there no matter what its own query of the hardware says.

    You may need to monkey with BootX settings as well; I don't have my YDL docs handy, so check yours.
  • Why not spring for a 3 button USB mouse?

    I'd do it anyway just to avoid the damned round mouse. What were they thinking?

  • Duh (Score:2)

    by hey! ( 33014 )
    What I meant to say is enter the mem param in BootX. No LILO on PPC. It's been a while, and those damned Linux boxes are so easy to admin I forget these things.
  • I dunno. All I can say is that I don't have this problem on my Blue G3 running YDL. This sounds like a job for one of those Mac hardware gurus ("Sure, you just clear your parameter RAM by holding your left ear with your right hand hand thumbing your nose with your left foot.") Perhaps you should post this to a Linux PPC mailing list.

    And don't discount bad RAM as a possibbility. It does happen.

    Good luck.

  • That paragraph is just specifically about mac-on-linux [ibrium.se], which is an independent project whose gpled software is getting bundled by LinuxPPC and heretofore has not been a normal part of the distribution. It'd be like RedHat bundling Apache and saying "If you have questions about Apache, please direct your questions to the Apache website or to this mailing list we have set up over here." LinuxPPC's support [linuxppc.com] in general is quite decent.

    I'm only saying all this because your post was ambiguous as to whether you knew they were just referring to mac-on-linux.
  • Actually, the other poster who also replies to this addresses this point with more knowlege than I have on it, and says that it doesn't work on the later (current) Macs, like G3s etc.

    But in truth, I had forgotten about that.

    timothy
  • is that when this is available in your friendly neighborhood CompUSA, Best Buy, Fry's, or whatever the local equivalent is, a happy situation will have made itself manifest: a customer will be able to choose an operating sytem that works on both PowerMac and x86 hardware.

    Remember when (real soon [then]), the Mac OS was going to run on Intel? Remember when Win NT was going to be everyone's multi-platform solution?

    Despite announcements and promises by the above-named, a month from now guess which OS Joe Everyman will actually be able to purchase, in real time, in real life? Linux. Interesting that the non-UNIX workalike with dozens of semi-competitive / mostly-friendly distributors manages to pull off that feat of convergence, while centrally planned behemoths faltered in their own giant footsteps.

    Just thoughts,

    timothy
  • A couple quick question for you Hazz.

    first, when will I be able to install it off the net? Also, will I have to download the entire RedHat folder? My setup is currently for YDL, since they had the first support for B&W G3s and they didn't make you dowload the entire RedHat folder, so I didn't allocate the HD space to make installing linuxppc 1999-q3 possible. I hope that all I will need to do is download a kernel file and a ramdisk file, just like old times. The install procedure for 1999-q3 was a step back from the older way, imho. Thanks for your time.

    -Dan
  • How did you do this? When I go to install 1999-Q3 w/o the RedHat folder, I end up missing a ton of stuff. Please email me deschust@syr.edu [mailto]. Thanks in advance.

    -Dan
  • I've never used a PPC machine so I'm probably wrong, but can't you say something like mem=256M on the boot line? It's probably documented in the PPC lilo equivalent.



  • Ok, so you'll probably have to put a bunch of bullshit settings back in the control panel. If this works you will at least have your memory back. If that works then you can use something like Tech Tool Pro to save the contents of your MacOS sane PRAM. After a Linux session just use Tech Tool to put the correct PRAM settings back.

  • The poster, #14, mentioned that gcc wasn't optimized for Alpha Linux. The Compaq compilers are.

  • If you want more performance for your Alpha running Linux, then download the Compaq compilers.
    C and Fortran. No charge for personal use. Cheap for commercial use.

    http://www.compaq.com/linux/software

    gcc is fine for most things, but if you have an Alpha and you are doing lots of floating point, it behooves you to try the Compaq compilers. There's 8-10 years of optimization in them!

    mike
  • Well, there is a between Blackdown and the PowerPC JDK effort. [ivey.uwo.ca]

    Also, I seem to recall (I can't find it now) that LinuxPPC had the IBM VM for download on their site.
  • Oh Am I an idiot!!!

    First of all here is the google search [google.com]

    Secondly here [ivey.uwo.ca] is the link from above!
  • (I realize this was a troll, but I will respond anyway...)

    LinuxOne doesn't need to rip anyone off.. they can just use the Linux/PPC Developers' Reference Release. See www.crashing.org [crashing.org] for more information.

    The purpose of the Linux/PPC Developers' Reference Release is to allow any company/individual to make their own distribution based on Red Hat with little work.

    --Mark
  • You say it can change partition types...does that mean that if I currently have a MacOS partition and a MacOS X Server partition that I used to use for showing MOSXS to customers, I can change the MOSXS partition to LinuxPPC without losing the data on my regular MacOS partition?

    Or am I completely off base and I would have to back up, then repartition...
  • The part I was most impressed by was the fact that BootX is not required. I think BootX is a great tool (and that Ben Herrenschmidt is One Cool Guy for writing it), but I like the idea of not needing a Mac OS partition.

    It looks like IBM is finally getting their POP board spec finished. With any luck we should be seeing dirt cheap non-Apple branded hardware before too long.

    LinuxPPC has been working with IBM on software for the POP systems, so it is not too surprising to see their distro targeted towards these machines. However, YDL has some kind of a contract with IBM, so I would not be surprised to see them supporting the new hardware pretty soon as well.

    Well done, LinuxPPC! If I weren't downloading an ISO of mkLinux right now, I'd be grabbing the new release already.
  • Well, actually this is really not that good an idea. NetBSD is more efficent in some respects but it has several failings compared to Linux/PPC:

    1) Poor user base. Hey, it's a good system, but more people with Power PC's use Linux/PPC than NetBSD and that means a lot, especially in terms of support for the macintosh hardware.

    2) NetBSD can't read Apple Partition maps. That's right, kiddies! If you want to install NetBSD on your box you need a dedicated drive. No MacOS for you. Compare this to Linux/PPC which even gives you Mac on linux and it becomes obvious which one will get more users to migrate.

    3) No support for Linux/PPC binaries. This is just a matter of no one getting around to doing it yet, but it illustrates an important point: There simply isn't as much support for Power PC users in the NetBSD community as there is in the Linux community.

    4) 8-bit XServer - Blah.

    If I had another drive, I would install NetBSD, but I don't think I am going to give up Linux/PPC any time soon.

    --
    Lagos - White Rabbit of Linux
  • It's also nice to know, that although I am a dedicated Linux/PPC user, YelloDog has an iso image, and Linux/PPC doesn't. Yellow Dog has also done neat work with Beowolf clusters. It also supported G3's before Linux/PPC, I believe.
  • Well, there is an old iso image at:

    ftp://cwrulug.cwru.edu/linuxppc-R5.iso

    But I don't know if they're going to post a new one.

    --
    Lagos - White Rabbit of Linux
  • Let's try to solve this mouse problem, shall we?

    Hmm. Well, in the 2.2.6 kernels I have used, I think you can use '=' on the keypad as the right click and 'clear' on the keypad as middle click.

    Of course, you can also try these items:

    1) Add the line "clear mod2" to your .Xmodmap and try Option-2 and Option-3 as middle and right buttons respectively.

    2) option-click for middle and option-control-click for right. I think this is a KDE thingie, though.
  • I'm not going to say not to download it, but if you can afford to buy it, please do. We need to support these companies that are doing a lot of work to make installing and using Linux on all kinds of different platforms really easy to do. They are also the companies that are funding development of the kernel and user space packages that make Linux (the best OS) even better. I've already ordered my copy. . .

    I for one am going to start buying all my distributions (now that I have a good job :)). I encourage others to do the same. Prove the pundits wrong - make Linux profitable :)
  • What really upsets me are these Revenge of the Nerds success stories. Who cares if they are smart? I think that thinks aren't worth doing unless they take a little bit of sweat and cruelty.

    Christ, it saddens me to hear someone who probably considers themselves a "jock" or at least a bully say shit like "Well, I was going to de-pants him, but his belt was fastened too tight...". Do people realize that they are effectively calling themselves wimps and geeks by saying shit like this?

    Oh well, not everyone can beat up geeks and get all the girls like me :-)
  • Uhhm... Just a small correction, but pdisk doen't require you to figure out the amount of hard drive space in blocks. If, for example, you wanted a hundred meg swap partition you would type 100M when it asked for size.
  • I've been watching the Prophet Systems site sporadically, and it looks like the development is just slow. The publicly posted POP design is just a 4-year-old CHRP board, so the companies have to do a lot of development on their own (if they want better than 1x AGP, ATA/33, etc.).

    Where is my mind?
    mfspr r3, pc / lvxl v0, 0, r3 / li r0, 16 / stvxl v0, r3, r0
  • For all you curious Mac people out there, there is a command line built into every PCI mac. On later models (G3's, I think anything older needs a nasty 2-computer setup) you can simply access the command line by holding down cmd-opt-o-f as the computer starts up. Instructions for using the command line can be found in Apple's dev technotes, 1061 [apple.com] and 1062 [apple.com].

    If you're just bored, playing with this can be fun. Forth is a twisted language.

    Where is my mind?
    mfspr r3, pc / lvxl v0, 0, r3 / li r0, 16 / stvxl v0, r3, r0
  • I use Metrowerks. Not free, but OK. Optimizations are alright, but I really like RISC asm programming. You don't have to worry about all kinds of addressing modes, etc., or what gets translated to what microcode.
    Really besides the point, I guess, but asm is not and will never be a dead language.

    Where is my mind?
    mfspr r3, pc / lvxl v0, 0, r3 / li r0, 16 / stvxl v0, r3, r0
  • FWB does all that's physically possible. You say [in a post below] that it can only shrink, not grow, partitions. Growing partitions to the point that the allocation block size changes is impossible. You would need to reorganize all the files on the disk. If yer gonna install another OS, why would you be expanding the partition anyway?

    If you wanna get down+dirty, and you're using a SCSI drive, I know how to rewrite the partition map to do just this (using the MacOS API). Hint: you can't do it through the disk driver.

    Where is my mind?
    mfspr r3, pc / lvxl v0, 0, r3 / li r0, 16 / stvxl v0, r3, r0
  • High-end IBM servers, ancient BeBoxes, Mac clones, embedded systems :v) .

    But most importantly, POP. The PowerPC Open Platform is allowing many companies like Prophet Systems [eternalcomputing.com] (they were the first, I can't remember the others...) to develop their own motherboards based on the CHRP standard originally designed to support a wide variety of processors. These are not available yet, but when they are, they will be dirt cheap (especially considering that G4's are less expensive than Pentiums).

    Where is my mind?
    mfspr r3, pc / lvxl v0, 0, r3 / li r0, 16 / stvxl v0, r3, r0
  • Ben Herrenshmidt (I think I got the name right) wrote the kernel for the new motherboards, winning instant fame and popularity...

    He got it all working a while ago, so it should be included in the friendly GUI install included in this new LinuxPPC distro. Speaking of which, I just ordered it for my G4 Sawtooth!

    Where is my mind?
    mfspr r3, pc / lvxl v0, 0, r3 / li r0, 16 / stvxl v0, r3, r0

  • My 2 bits (Score:3)

    by chainsaw1 ( 89967 ) on Monday February 14, 2000 @12:01PM (#1276028)
    I would like to remind everyone that LinuxPPC, like RedHat, Debian, et. al. is downloadable via the web for free. Check out linuxppc.org [linuxppc.org] and for help, most HOWTO's are accurate. Also there is a LinuxPPC listserv. [linuxppc.org] Also for help try the FAQ OMatic [dartmouth.edu] for more info. LinuxPPC 1999 had an installer program that ran after you downloaded it For those of you people who own old PCI Mac's I highly recommend trying it. The TCP performance blows the doors off of OpenTransport 1.3 (MacOS 8.1) on my StarMax. It also lets me use slave IDE devices for bulking up on storage, which MacOS 8.1 does not :). The only sad part is LinuxPPC, like Linux x86 does not support HFS Extended yet, so if you want to save data you have to convert drives back to HFS (unless they updated this for Linux 2000).

  • My LinuxPPC experiences (Score:3)

    by zpengo ( 99887 ) on Monday February 14, 2000 @11:55AM (#1276035) Homepage
    We've got an old PPC at work, and few of the linuxheads around here decided to repartition the harddrive and toss LinuxPPC on it, just to see how it would work. On the whole, I was rather impressed. It actually performs better (IMHO) than the MacOS 8.5 that occupies the other partition. I've been using LinuxPPC almost exclusively on this computer now, only booting into MacOS when I have to retrieve a particular file or run a certain application.

    So far I've had no conflicts between the OSes. Upon startup, a dialog comes up asking which OS I want to boot into (Mac is the default, which activates after a few seconds). All I have to do is press the Linux button, and then I'm in Linux as if this were any old '86.

    At first I thought that LinuxPPC was sort of a gimmicky thing ("Oh, lets see if we can get it to run on a Mac too"), but so far I've been nothing but impressed with its performance.

    The only thing that bugs me is that I only have a single-button mouse. There's supposed to be a key toggle that activates a right-click, but it doesn't work for some reason. I've had several linuxheads try to remap the key combo, but it just doesn't want to go -- thus rendering the Gimp and some windowmanagers useless.

    Oh, well. :o)

    ZP

  • Re:Install (Score:3)

    by friedo ( 112163 ) on Monday February 14, 2000 @12:22PM (#1276041) Homepage
    Not really. The reccomended booting method is via BootX, which loads as an extension during the MacOS boot. Click Linux, and the kernel is loaded from the current Mac partition. You can also boot directly via Open Firmware and skip MacOS altogether, but OF is broken on a lot of Macs and I've never gotten it to work exactly right on my PT Pro.

  • It is also the first distrib to contain packages from miguel's company Helix Code. The packages are of course of GNOME. The Helix Code crew saw it fit to include my favorite window manager sawmill in with their packages!!

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