[juneau-lug] Re: Linux for PPC

Chad,

yellow dog is a great idea.  Between them and Gentoo they constitute 
the bulk of heavy work being doing on the powerpc platform.
Here are some resources that might help out

http://yellowdoglinux.com
        You probably already know this but I would start there.  For specific 
problems check their mailing list archives first and then branch out 
into the general linuxppc mailing lists if you still can't figure it 
out.

http://penguinppc.org/
        This is a great place for general linux/ppc port information, it can 
be a bit dated sometimes but it does have great links

http://penguinppc.org/projects/yaboot/
        Yaboot is most likely the boot loader you are going to be using.  Read 
the HOWTO and any documentation you can get your hands on.  I would 
imagine Yellowdog will do a good job of setting it up but it never 
hurts to know how it works.  The guy that writes it hangs out in 
#debianppc on irc.freenode.net most of the time and believe it or not 
lives in the Fairbanks area.

http://penguinppc.org/dev/kernel.shtml
        Check out this page when your ready to roll your own kernel.  For the 
2.4 series of kernel you'll want to download the sources from the sites 
listed on this page instead of the plain kernel.org sources.  They tend 
to have more complete driver support and not as many annoying bugs.  
For the 2.6 series I can't remember where I got my sources but I seem 
to think it was from BenH as well.  There was some noise about getting 
BenH and Linus's trees in sync more often but I don't know what became 
of it.

http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/macppc/models.html
        While your not installing netbsd, the netbsd folks have put together a 
good page that talks about the different open firmware versions for 
powerpc.  In case you haven't worked with open firmware before here is 
a quick description.  Open Firmware is sorta like a PC's bios on speed. 
  I has a command line interface and is very programmable.  However 
apple over the years has gone through several versions of open firmware 
with the later versions being mostly bug free.  Older versions has 
quirks and restrictions on the boot media they can load an OS off of.  
Check out this page to see how your machine stacks up, it will help in 
case you run into a snag.  There are also links for more detailed 
information on open-firmware.  A nice feature of newer copies of 
open-firmware is it has a graphical boot loader built in.  If you ever 
get stuck and need to get back to your linux parition provided ybin is 
loaded you can hold "option" and it will bring up a choice menu.

Irc://irc.freenode.net
        #debianppc and #gentoo-ppc (I think that's the channel name) are both 
great places for general chat and help about the powerpc platform.  I'm 
not sure where yellowdog's support channels are but most people will be 
glad to help you in either place.  Though don't get upset if they want 
you to install their distrib :)

There are a couple of gotcha's.
-One is HFS support.  I don't know about the yellowdog kernel but most 
older powerpc kernels did not have full read write hfs+ support.  So as 
a consiquence if you have a HFS+ partition you'll need to get an 
updated kernel built to write or possibly read from it.  If you get 
stuck and need a file off an HFS drive and you don't have the right 
kernel stuff in there use hmount and hcopy to get it moved around.  
hcopy and hmount are very picky about their syntax and will often times 
not copy from a full path.  So you typically have to use hcopy ./file 
:folder:on_mac_drive:  This might not be the case with a newer copy of 
hutils but keep it in mind.
-The soundcard support at least for this machine sucked with the stock 
DMA sound drivers in the regular kernels.  I ended up grabbing a copy 
of the ALSA drivers and that worked much better.  Your millage may 
vary.
-Apple for some reason decided to start using winmodems in their 
laptops and it might be the case for the desktop's as well. There have 
been rumors of support for them existing but I haven't tired it yet.  
Ask in some of the powerpc linux channels or perhaps on some of the 
mailing lists.  YDL's site has some good links.

Hope this helps a bit, have fun. And as usual if I'm wrong about 
something i've put in here please feel free to correct me.
Justin Burket

On Feb 21, 2004, at 11:46 AM, Chad Tudor wrote:

> Hello Juneau LUG,
>
> I just bought a Linux distro for $8.00 on ebay, Yellow Dog 3.0, and
> plan to install it on my Power Mac G4. I am overanxious to get the
> install underway.  Anybody here run Linux RPM on the Power PC platform?
> Any comments?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Chad Tudor
> Linux newbie
>
>
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