Hello Adrian,
thank you for your reply!
On 9 Jan 2021, at 13:30, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
On 1/8/21 9:08 PM, Johannes Brakensiek wrote:
and a happy new year to you. Thanks to Covid19-based restrictions I
returned to a
Mac PPC (PowerMac 11,2) the last days to rejoin the Apple hardware
party of my youth
and do happy compiling on PPC64.
Great. Maybe you're interested in helping to improve the Debian
PowerPC ports?
well, I already invested some (more) time to dig into the issues below.
I’d do some further QA after fixing and report issues if I find some
time to do that.
Once I manage installation an aim of mine would be to install SUSE’s
Open Build Service on that machine. Because the PowerPC architecture is
missing at their public service for building Debian packages. So if
I’d ever manage to get that running, then further more packages could
be built using that machine. But that’s just a uncertain glimpse into
the future. In addition to this I’d have to mention I would not want
to run that machine 24/7 as that would suck half the power delivered by
the coal-fired power plant next door. I’d be already seeing myself
travelling down the Rhine river on a cargo ship, delivering the coal
required to keep that thing running. ;)
debian-installer is currently broken on PowerMacs due to two issues:
- libparted crashes on 32-bit PowerPC causing the partitioner to hang
forever when starting up
- grub-installer is currently not properly setting up the HFS
partition for installing GRUB
Both issues are known and being worked on. However, since my primary
debug machine is an
iBook G4 which is a 32-bit machine, I cannot work on the
grub-installer issue until I have
resolved the libparted issue.
The partioner issue turned out to be rather difficult to debug but I
have already localized
it to a problem in libparted.
[…]
The grub-installer in this ISO image is not the correct one which has
been patched for
PowerMac support. I will fix that later.
Try installing GRUB manually:
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GRUB_on_Open_Firmware_(PowerPC)
Last question in advance: I saw sid PPC64 ships kernel version 5.10.
Is the following issue already
patched or am I going to run into that one as well and should wait
until kernel has been updated to
at least 5.10.2 (my PowerMac G5 still runs a GeForce 6600 currently)?
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=210517
Debian unstable has already kernel 5.10.4 [1] which - according to
this bug report - contains the fix.
Ok, thank you very much for these information. That’s good to know and
sounds promising!
Regarding the manual installation of GRUB I took some time to study that
tutorial (and try some first steps), but it looks like that is for those
knowing the powerful way of the boot path warrior. I am showing great
respect for these honourable men and women and their way to higher
levels of achievements. But for me I decide to stay a simple man and
wait for the fixes to come. ;)
Thank you for your work. Once some fixes arrive I’d be eager to test
them.
Best
Johannes
