[solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

kruemeltee · 2008-12-23 12:35:13

Hello everybody,

I just want to ask if archlinuxppc works with this IBook (300 MHz, maybe 366 and in best case 400 MHz). I'm using archlinux since about 3 years on my desktop (x64) and in the past on my old notebook (Intel 2,6 GHz 512 MB Ram) ... currently I'm trying to buy this ibook and I want to install archlinux too (since I've heard from archlinuxppc). I just want to work with it (writing, Internet, a little bit music and, if possible, watching simple movies). As I've heard, you can't compare a 300 ppc with an 300 MHz Intel computer. It seems as if a ppc is a little bit faster than an intel, isn't ist? I've worked successfully with archlinux an an 1 GHz Notebook and it worked fine. So the simple question is, how does archlinux will work in this item?

regards
kruemeltee

Last edited by kruemeltee (2009-02-26 05:54:40)

jskier · 2008-12-24 19:29:15

I run it on my iBook G4 1 gigahertz, 1.25 gigs of RAM (a modest step a above yours, a giant leap behind the last few years). I'm not sure how PPC Arch would run on your machine, but I've noticed a much quicker response over OS X. All the basics work (audio, display, mouse), and wireless works fairly well (success with WEP, WPA). It runs OpenOffice 3 great, and Firefox is good enough for GMail and basic surfing (I don't think flash works anymore). Plays DVDs and older videos, but I haven't tried the latest video formats yet. That's about all I use it for, a small, portable composition and basic Internet machine. Based on the processing speed you might take a big hit, I'd try Xfce4 or other minimal xwindow guis; or tough it out with the command line

Max out the RAM too, it makes a world of difference on PPC architecture.

Distro-jumper · 2009-01-05 20:44:53

I'm running it my iBook G3, 600 MHz and 640 MB ram, and it's running quite nicely. Although, I had a lot of trouble getting X to work, but I finally got a working xorg.conf. There's a couple of ppc bugs in gnome right now, but hopefully that will get worked out here shortly (currently I can't do music or videos). I think gnome & xfce were just added to the ppc port so bugs can be expected. I would probably recommend xfce for your machine as well. You can check out the current bug reports:

http://bugs.archlinuxppc.org/index.php? … 1&do=index

Also, the current ftp installer (2008.08.1) doesn't work. So use the 2007.08.2 ftp installer.

kruemeltee · 2009-02-20 11:53:03

I've just bought this ibook clamshell and so I'm currently trying to install archlinuxppc on this item. But there were some problems, some of them I've already fixed, but now I'm not getting forward.

First of all was a mechanic problem, disassembling the ibook for installing a new hard disk. So the current configuration of this item is:
300 MHz ppc processor
currently 170 MB RAM (I already ordered 512 MB Ram, so I'll get 544 MB Ram on this item very soon)
40 GB harddisk

the first step was to download a working archlinuxppc ISO. I've got the "wrong" one, just about 30 MB for installing via ftp (2008 core dump ftp iso). But I successfully installed archlinux on an intel machine via ftp so I thought, this will be nearly the same.

Configuring the harddisk was not as easy as usual. I've always used cfdisk for preparing the harddisk, but this doesn't work in this case, so I had to use another, textbased, program. But I solved this problem after a while.

Setting the mountpoints was no problem. But there was one thing that I was worried about during the whole installation until this step. An error message appeared every 5 minutes, saying:

INIT: Id "c0" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

The next step was to select the packages. At this point I recognized that I've downloaded the wrong iso image for the first time. After chosing "CD" as source for the packages setup mounted the cd from /dev/hdc in /src but was not able to find the needed packages. So I started the setup again with the help of ftp installation.

When I got to the point of selecting packages there where 3 Servers available:

ftp://ftp.archlinuxppc.org
ftp://xentac.net
ftp://ftp.archlinuxfr.org

by chosing the first ftp I was able to download the package list. Chosing the "base" package list and all of its contents I got the error

unable to download pacman

so I returned back to the ftp choice and tried the 2nd and 3rd ftp. But the setup was not able to download the package list from these servers.

Error fetching package list from server

(I checked the network connection and it worked)

I've decided to get the complete core Image with the packages inside (instead of using the network installation). As I've seen there was a new version from 2009 so I downloaded this one.

Everything works fine until I got to the packages choice. setup was not able to find the /src/core/pkg directory. I've checked the cd (after mounting manually on the ibook and now on a second machine), there is no directory called "core" neither a subdirectory called "pkg".

I was a little bit confused so I've downloaded all pacakages manually on my Desktop and copied them to an usb-stick into a directory called "core/pkg"

After chosing "SRC manually mounted" instead of cdrom setup was able to find the packages.txt (list of contents) so I checked the whole "base" list. Now setup was able to unpack the pacman-package ... but there appears the next error message:

Installing packages...

/arch/setup: line 955: pacman.static: command not found

Package Installation FAILED.

so ... what now? currently I got 2 questions.

the first one: how am I solving the last error to be able to install the packages?
the second one: is my processor an 686er? I don't know if this description is the same like the intel processor description? Is this at ppc processors the same?

with best regards
Martin Schuchardt

Last edited by kruemeltee (2009-02-20 11:55:53)

kruemeltee · 2009-02-20 12:02:34

okay, I've just found out, that the "2009" iso image is not a ppc image, so that this down't work is'nt any longer a question.

but how to install archlinuxppc?

mfg maddin

jordz · 2009-02-20 12:12:24

I don't have a PPC, but did you use this one: http://archlinuxppc.org/download/ ?

kruemeltee · 2009-02-20 12:57:55

yeah ... I found this one. I just downloaded the core-base ISO with the packages within from 2006 ... this time the installation works fine until the step of installing the kernel. It seems as if the setup doesn't find the kernel package for installing.

I searched the cd for the kernel package and found the package kernel26-2.6.17.11-1.pkg.tar.gz ...

now I'm trying chroot and installing manually the kernel with the help of pacman

I hope this will work!

greetings
Maddin

Distro-jumper · 2009-02-20 14:32:55

The other option if you can't get the kernel working is (assuming you have a newworld mac):

Distro-jumper wrote:

Also, the current ftp installer (2008.08.1) doesn't work. So use the 2007.08.2 ftp installer.

kruemeltee · 2009-02-20 14:51:13

okay, i sucessfully installed the kernel (the first time with the help of changeroot and pacman ... and (yeah, unbelieveable) with the help of quickinstall) ...

the current problem ist to install the bootloader. if installing with the help of "setup" I have to edit the config file for yaboot" ... I just don't know what to type at the "device" line ...

the setup says the "device" line can be figured out with the help of a command (don't know what precisely), but this command isn't available within the setup prompt ... if I use changeroot the command is available, but not "dev/hda" (of course not) ...

is is possible to install grub instead of yaboot?

regards
Maddin

Distro-jumper · 2009-02-20 17:07:06

Does running 'yabootconfig' work? If not, then as taken from Gentoo's wonderful documentation:

## hd: is shorthand for the first hard drive Open Firmware sees
device=hd:

Then once you're up and running you should be able to use 'ofpath /dev/hda2' and get the exact device path.

Oh, and no grub does not work.

Last edited by Distro-jumper (2009-02-20 17:07:33)

kruemeltee · 2009-02-20 18:51:59

yabootconfig doesn't exist within the setup prompt, but with the help of changeroot yabootconfig is available, but it says:

yabootconfig: This utility requires the /proc filesystem

by using "device=hd:" it seems as if yaboot finds the correnct partition (in my case /dev/hda2) but fails with an error message like before:

hmount: /dev/hda2: not a Macintosh HFS volume (invalid argument)
ybin: /dev/hda2 appears to have never had a bootstrap installed, please run mkofboot

I'm not able to run mkofboot, because its not available within the setup prompt. After chroot it's available, of course, but there is neighter /dev/hda nor any other devices within /dev so I'm not able to run this successfully.

I tried to do something like this within the bootprompt

ln -s /dev/hda /mnt/dev/hda
chroot /mnt

but this didn't work either because after chroot /dev/hda links to /dev/hda (as it was correctly before, but now under the new root not anymore)

the problem is, I don't really know what a bootstrap is! During the installation, especially during the partition of the harddisk setup told me to use some special partitions ... so my partition table looks like that:

#            type             name                 length        base    (size)        system
/dev/hda1    Apple_partition_map    Apple        63    @    1    (31.5k)        Partition Map
/dev/hda2    Apple_Bootstrap        bootstrap    1600    @    64    (800.0k)    NewWorld Bootblock
/dev/hda3    Apple_UNIX_SVR2        root        12582912@    1664    (6G)        Linux native
[...]
/dev/hda8    Apple_Free        Extra        2641024 @    bla    (1.3G)        Free Space

what now?

thanks for your help :-)

regards
Martin

Distro-jumper · 2009-02-20 20:23:55

Are you following the arch linux ppc install guide to chroot into a system:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ins … ate_chroot

mount -t ext3 /dev/hda3 /mnt
cp /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/etc/resolv.conf
sed -e 's/mnt//g' < /etc/mtab > /mnt/etc/mtab
mount -t proc none /mnt/proc
mount -t sysfs none /mnt/sys
chroot /mnt /bin/bash
source /etc/profile
makedevs

Note: makedevs create devices in /dev

This could explain why yabootconfig can't find /proc because you need to mount it, and why you have no devices in /dev because you need to makedevs.

If that doesn't work, then maybe a Debian or Ubuntu CD would help install yaboot:

http://ppclinux.info/wiki/maclin/Yaboot (Towards the bottom of the page)
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p= … stcount=18

kruemeltee · 2009-02-20 20:54:28

okay, this code helped me running "yabootconfig" successfully ... so I thought ... rebooting and everything is okay ...

at the bootup yaboot tells me now, that the found Image in /boot/kernel26.img is no ELF or ELF32 Image. What about now? Currently I'm tryiing to install the kernel a second time. But this time with the help of a complete chroot (as shown in the previous post).

I'll tell you if I'm lucky!

thanks a lot for your help!

regards
Maddin

kruemeltee · 2009-02-21 07:02:51

okay ... step by step I'm getting closer to the solution.

With the help of this changeroot I got successfully into my system. From there I ran sucessfully the command

yabootconfig

. The setup of yaboot asked me if I want to boot from /dev/hda3 as my boot-partition (this is right) and if my bootstrap-partition is /dev/hda2 (this is right too).

After that it seems as if yabootconfig is not able to find a kernel so I have to tell him where to find.
yabootconfig asked for kernel image
my answer: /boot/kernel26.img

yaboot asked for initrd image
my answer: /boot/initrd.img

(both img files exist on that location)

yabootconfig seems to be successfully installed so I rebooted the ibook. What a surprise: the bootmanager was available. So I startet but he told me that the kernel image is not a valid ELF32 Image.

So I tried the same thing and when yabootconfig asked me for a kernel image i answered:
/boot/vmlinux26

this seems to be th right answer. So I restarted and now archlinux PPC seems to get started. I got dropped from yaboot into the normal archlinux boot screen with the logo on the right side of the top and many kernel messages running through the appeared screen. Until there appeared a kernel panic:

Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(3,3)
 <0>Rebooting in 180 seconds...

all my partitions are reiserfs partitions. Should I change that? Before that it seems as if archlinux tried ext2! How am I able to tell him, to use reiserfs!

wbr
Maddin

Last edited by kruemeltee (2009-02-21 08:44:32)

kruemeltee · 2009-02-21 10:01:29

okay, next step ...

as my battery is empty the notebook doesn't remember the time ... I have to set the time everytime I start manually (if I'm not doing this pacman, better to say mkinitcpio, tells me for many files, the time is not correct ... somewhere in 1903). I changed that so everthing is okay.

while "updating" the kernel (including building the one) I recognized, that the initrd image has changed its name from initrd26.img to kernel26.img ... because of that I started yabootconfig again and if it asked me for kernel images and initrd images I told:

kernel: /boot/vmlinux26
initrd: /boot/kernel26.img

that one worked so that archlinux was now able to read the root filesystem (the following error message doesn't appear anymore:)

Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(3,3)
 <0>Rebooting in 180 seconds...

now there is a new one:

kinit: Cannot open root device hda3(3,3)
kinit: init not found!

so, what now? what does this (3,3) mean? Maybe archlinux is searching and the wrong harddisk? Does he mean the 3rd Disk and the 3rd partition?

regards
Martin Schuchardt

P.S.: I tried it with the kernel26-fallback.img and that one works! How am I able to get it working with the kernel26.img?

Last edited by kruemeltee (2009-02-21 10:43:59)

kruemeltee · 2009-02-21 10:44:37

Within the kernel-fallback.img bootup I "update" the kernel and created a new kernel26.img. I reconfigured /etc/yaboot.conf and changed the line from kernel26-fallback.img into kernel26.img. reboot ... and everything works!

Now I'm trying to update the system with the help of pacman BUT ...

first of all it seems as if the ftp's from archlinuxppc are not very up to date ... (or am I wrong?)
second: is it possible to build packages from the original archlinux AUR for working on my ppc system?

regards
Martin Schuchardt

konni · 2009-02-21 16:02:46

first, archlinuxppc is a community project, so the packages are not always as up-to-date as the normal archlinux ones.
second, on my ps3 i can build most aur packages by adding arch=(ppc) to the PKGBUILD.

kruemeltee · 2009-02-22 14:22:40

you mean "most" ... what does that mean? What happens if your not able to build them?

Until today my opinion about archlinuxppc is that it's really great! I love archlinux as well and getting the possibility for installing archlinux on a ppc is one of the best I can think of! But as you say, I got used to archlinux so I got used to the actual packages too.

Currently I just want to install some basic packages like xorg, xfce and some other stuff (xine, xmms and so on) but, at least for the moment, it seems as if these packages are not in the repositories. Or am I searching wrong? That's why I asked for building packets from the AUR.

At first I want to upgrade the kernel or at least the system (with pacman -Syu). There was an error message, that acl was not found withing the repositories! Thats the next cause for asking if building packages from the AUR works! :-)

thanks a lot for your help :-)

regards
Martin Schuchardt

Distro-jumper · 2009-02-22 16:44:47

The first package from the core repository is 'acl':

ftp://ftp.archlinuxppc.org/core/os/ppc/

I would set this as the default in /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist, obviously without the /core/os/ppc part. Also xorg, xfce, xine, xmms are very basic items that are already included in extra.

kruemeltee · 2009-02-22 18:35:39

okay ... thats intresting ... the packages are on the server (I'm currently downloading the packages manually to copy them to a usb Stick and take them to the ibook).

Pacman on the ibook is able to connect with the server, but the version is too old as there ist a "mirrorlist" in /etc/pacman.d ... there are still the old files called "extra" and "current" ... (i was missing the file "core") ... in pacman.conf is "core" not mentioned so I added it and used the archlinuxppc.org ftp in /etc/pacman.d/core

the fascinating thing is ... if I type pacman -Syu pacman updates it's lists (however it works) and says "core, extra and current" is up to date (at the first time there was a update). Now he wants to install the packages and starts downloading, but pacman searchs for the wrong packets. All ppc packets are named like

acl-2.2.47-5-ppc.pkg.tar.gz

but pacman is searching for the wrong packet:

acl-2.2.47-5.pkg.tar.gz

whats wrong here? Why does pacman search for the "non" ppc packet? Where does pacman takes its information about its lists? I hope after updating with the manual downloaded packages everything works fine. Maybe the old pacman used another way to "update" it's lists as the new (better to say, the current) one.

regards
Martin

Last edited by kruemeltee (2009-02-22 18:36:12)

konni · 2009-02-22 19:48:27

here's my mirrorlist:

Server = ftp://ftp.archlinuxppc.org/$repo/os/ppc
Server = http://mir2.archlinuxfr.org/archlinux/$repo/os/ppc

did you set the 'ppc' right?
maybe download a fresh pacman package and install it manually.

kruemeltee · 2009-02-23 06:56:29

okay ... I downloaded the sources manually and installed pacman by hand. This worked and now I'm able to access every file from the repositorys. So I started a pacman -Syu (some error about <file> already exist in file system) ... I think that's caused on the fact, that the arch-setup I used for installing archlinux on this machine was very old. So I ran pacman -Syu -f. That worked for me and so I'm now the happy owner of a stable and up to date archlinuxppc on my ibook clamshell.

Currently I'm trying to install (better to say to get working) the xorg (in my case xfce4) ... but I have to experiment with the xorg.conf a little bit. But now as there are all the packages available everything is fine!

Great work guys! Thanks a lot!

regards
Martin Schuchardt

kruemeltee · 2009-02-23 12:52:15

okay ... the ibook is working now. I successfully installed xorg and xfce4. I'm really glad that everything is working now. except 3 things ...

Keyboard Layout
within the tty console I'm using the keymap de-latin1.map.gz or the de-latin1-nodeadkeys.map.gz. Nearly every key works except the one with "<>", the key just right of the "1" key below the "esc" key. There are coming the characters ^ and ° (like at a normal 105 pc keyboard). So I'm currently not able to use the characters < and >. Furthermore I'm missing the key combination of "|" and "entf". | is used for pipes, entf is not really neccessary!
Under MacOSX I find the "|" ( with the help of Apple+ 7 ... but that's not working here. So I'm trying th find out the correct keymap for this keyboard. If nothing helps I have to create the keymap for myself! I tried the keymaps mac-de-latin1.map.gz but the result is like I diced all characters around the keyboard. Not even ENTER nor the arrow keys are on the right place :-)
I want to use them within the tty console and within X too!

mouse and rightclick
My touchpad got a "button-bar" below. It seems as if there where two buttons, one left and one right. (it may be possible that they return the same reaction). I read somewhere, that on MacOSX you have to press the apple key to activate "rightclick" functions and that the buildt in touchpad doesn't have two buttons. So the question is how to activate the apple key for using this one for right-click or on the other hand if the buttons are really two buttons how to tell X to use them!

xmms
I'm missing xmms within the repos. I think in that case I have to compile it for myself, right?

with best regards
Martin Schuchardt

Last edited by kruemeltee (2009-02-23 12:53:46)

konni · 2009-02-23 15:27:13

first, never used mac-keyboard.
second, start 'xev' and see if the output differs when you press button1/2.
third, yeah - pick a pkgbuild from aur or abs and add PPC to arch, it should build fine - never had problems with this yet.

kruemeltee · 2009-02-23 21:45:57

first: what a pitty ... or so lucky? (I don't know yet)
second: thanks for the advice. I used xev and found out, that it's just one button! So, how to enable the "apple" Button to change the function of the single button.
third: done!

regards
Martin Schuchardt

Arch Linux

#1 2008-12-23 12:35:13

[solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

#2 2008-12-24 19:29:15

Re: [solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

#3 2009-01-05 20:44:53

Re: [solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

#4 2009-02-20 11:53:03

Re: [solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

#5 2009-02-20 12:02:34

Re: [solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

#6 2009-02-20 12:12:24

Re: [solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

#7 2009-02-20 12:57:55

Re: [solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

#8 2009-02-20 14:32:55

Re: [solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

#9 2009-02-20 14:51:13

Re: [solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

#10 2009-02-20 17:07:06

Re: [solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

#11 2009-02-20 18:51:59

Re: [solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

#12 2009-02-20 20:23:55

Re: [solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

#13 2009-02-20 20:54:28

Re: [solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

#14 2009-02-21 07:02:51

Re: [solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

#15 2009-02-21 10:01:29

Re: [solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

#16 2009-02-21 10:44:37

Re: [solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

#17 2009-02-21 16:02:46

Re: [solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

#18 2009-02-22 14:22:40

Re: [solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

#19 2009-02-22 16:44:47

Re: [solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

#20 2009-02-22 18:35:39

Re: [solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

#21 2009-02-22 19:48:27

Re: [solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

#22 2009-02-23 06:56:29

Re: [solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

#23 2009-02-23 12:52:15

Re: [solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

#24 2009-02-23 15:27:13

Re: [solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

#25 2009-02-23 21:45:57

Re: [solved] iBook 300 MHz PPC and archlinux

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