Note 2: If you want to boot a non-Macintosh partition, say for instance a PPC Linux distribution, then change tbxi for yaboot. Note 3: If you get a CAN'T OPEN error, it means that you forgot to plug in your USB stick BEFORE powering on the computer, so turn the Mac off and start over from step #1. Getting the Revival on for Your PowerPC Mac Running Linux. What you need to get started depends on what type of optical drive you have in your G4- or G5-based PowerBook or Mac. Linux on PowerPC Macs has 2,055 members. This is an English-language user-to-user support group. Linux and BSD Unix are free, open source operating systems that have long been available on Apple Macintosh hardware but not nearly as widely deployed as the Mac OS. MintPPC - Fast and slick Linux for PPC computers. BTW, I also tried PowerPC 10.04 LTS and everything worked-everything. However, upgrading from PowerPC 10.04 to 12.10 was a train wreck. As I said, I've got both working-OS X 10.5.8 and PowerPC 12.04.01-although I'm still trying to track down the resolution of the wireless / Broadcom / B43 networking issue.
A long time ago, in a decade far, far away, I dabbled with Linux on PowerPC hardware, specifically the PowerPC Macintoshes. After lots of trial and error, I was able to get Yellow Dog Linux and Mandrake running on a Power Mac 8600 and then on a beige Power Mac G3 at my old job. I also managed to get Debian installed on a Motorola StarMax 4000 MT which I still have in storage (if you’re not familiar with this model, it was a Power Macintosh clone from back in the mid-1990s). I even got Ubuntu running on my iMac G5 and boy did that distro run circles around OS X Leopard back in the day! That was the last Macintosh I would ever own before committing to Linux on the PC.
However, a few months ago, I acquired two Power Macintoshes from someone I know. One is a Power Macintosh G4 “Sawtooth” which, unfortunately, won’t turn on (probably a bad power supply or a bad PRAM battery….or both). The other is a Power Macintosh G5. This particular G5 model is designated “Powermac7,3” which means it’s a dual 1.8 GHz G5 model with a NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra AGP Pro card and PCI slots. It came to me with Leopard installed on the hard drive. Of course, a Linux geek like myself wouldn’t stand for this. Thus, I replaced the hard drive and attempted to revisit my Linux/ppc days of yore.
![Mac Mac](/uploads/1/1/8/8/118819631/840106584.png)
Upon searching for a suitable Linux distribution, I quickly learned that support for the PowerPC was not as easy to come by in 2018. Most distributions stopped supporting PowerPC (ppc) and even PowerPC64 (ppc64) with the exception of little-endian PowerPC chips from IBM (ppc64el). While I did manage to find a Fedora ISO, it wouldn’t boot no matter what I tried. I eventually decided to go with tried-and-true Debian and, after a lot of searching, I came across the Debian Ports page which keeps unofficial ports of discontinued platforms. I downloaded the ISO for “sid” which is based on upcoming “buster” (v10) and burned it to a CD.
Hello, yaboot! It’s been a while…
Booting up from that CD on the Power Mac G5 and seeing the Yaboot prompt (Yaboot is a Linux boot loader for “NewWorld” Power Macs) brought back all those memories from my early Linux/ppc days! I went through the netinstall and, after a few failed attempts to boot and then creating an ext2 /boot partition after realizing that Yaboot doesn’t support ext4, I was finally able to boot the installed system…..until the screen went blank.
Setting some kernel parameters to prevent this from happening allowed me to get the login prompt after it booted up, and I quickly began installing packages. I got tmux (a terminal multiplexer, shown above) installed as well as many other packages like Window Maker, Fluxbox, and even the MATE desktop environment which was my ultimate goal. After configuring my .xinitrc to load Xorg with a window manager / desktop environment, I ran startx and….it failed. Doing some investigation online led me to news that the NVIDIA card and nouveau on PowerPC were to blame, and that getting it to work might require recompiling the kernel to use 4K page addressing instead of the default 64K. My heart sunk.
Nevertheless, I wasn’t going to quit so easily. After trying various changes to the kernel parameters and configuring device settings in Xorg.conf, my brain finally had an idea that was simple (and crazy) enough to actually work. See, I had my monitor connected to the G5 using a VGA-to-DVI adapter. After all of my failed attempts to get Xorg working, I decided to change out the VGA cable and adapter and use a dedicated DVI cable. I also changed the kernel parameters to use “nvidiafb”. After doing this, I rebooted the G5 and pessimistically ran “startx”. A gasp of joy came out of my mouth as I saw Window Maker start in all of its NeXTSTEP-ish glory! You can imagine the happy dance I did right after!
Achieved the “NeXT” step! ?
I then configured .xinitrc to load MATE and, after managing to disable window compositing which would cause it to lock up the system, I was inside the MATE desktop and life was….OK.
I say OK because I have come across some hiccups (as if you haven’t already noticed with all that I’ve mentioned so far). Pianobar and VLC crash with an “Illegal Instruction” message. Firefox ESR won’t last a minute before crashing, and the latest kernel upgrade from 4.16.5 to 4.17.6 caused the fans to run at full blast (something that I remember from my old iMac G5). Thankfully, after some more searching and comparing the modules loaded with the old kernel and the new kernel, I narrowed it down to the “windfarm” modules not loading on boot with the newer 4.17.6 kernel image. Running “modprobe windfarm_core” from the terminal tamed the fans once again. Not as straightforward as it was back in my early Linux/ppc days, but the Debian Ports maintainers for PowerPC do stress that we are running “sid”, aka “unstable”, and it is going to beunstable, so this behavior should be expected. I’ve tried to send a bug report to inform them of this, but ReportBug freezes the desktop when it tried to report the bug (adding insult to injury), so, for now, I’ve added the windfarm modules myself to /etc/modules as a workaround until they fix it.
Even with all of these quirks, it was nice to get Linux running on PowerPC hardware again. And, if you do come across some old Power Macintosh hardware (preferably a G4 or G5) and some time to spare, you can give it a try for yourself. You’ll find all the information you need on the Debian Ports page and the latest ISO can be found here (select ppc64 for 64-bit Debian to run on G5 Macs or select powerpc for 32-bit Debian to run on any Power Mac including the G5).
Once I have all (or at least most) of the kinks worked out, I hope to use this for some music production so I don’t have to rely so much on my Fedora laptop. I’ve got Qtractor, QjackCtl, and some DSSI soft synths installed and my Yamaha S08 synth is supported via USB for MIDI input, so I’m ready to rock and roll!
Now, if only I could reduce those xruns some more…
April 11, 2020
New ISO images
Linux For Powerpc G5
The old batch was starting to show its age, so there are now some fresh ISOimages. There are also some significant improvements in them. They are marked
20200411
. Of course, fresh rootfs tarballs are also included.As usual, they are available in
ppc64le
(POWER8+), ppc64
(G5+) and ppc
(generic) variants, with glibc
and musl
both supported.Let’s see:
Serial console support
There is now support for serial console integrated in the images, so you don’tnecessarily need a monitor and/or go through a bunch of hoops to manually setup the serial console. All you need to do is append some things on the kernelcommand line.
For example, on a Talos 2/Blackbird/
qemu-system-ppc64
:The first will get you a monitor as usual, the second the serial console.Keep in mind that it has to be last! There is a special hook in the liveinitramfs that sets up the respective
agetty
services.Dual kernels for big endian
Since some Macs have trouble booting on recent 5.x kernels, we’re now shippinga 4.4 LTS kernel as an alternative to the primary (currently 5.4) one. Youcan choose between them in the bootloader. So if you have one of thoseaffected machines, you can at least get the installer booted.
Keep in mind that with a network installation you’ll get the default kernelagain. The installer gives you an option to drop into the installed systembefore rebooting. You can install a kernel of your choice there.
Bootstrap partition validation in installer
Since a bunch of people complained about the installer booting fine but thefinal system not being bootable and the issue turned out to be swappedparameter order when creating the bootstrap partition on their Mac (andtherefore the partition having an incorrect type), the installer now checkswhether the partition is correct and tells you ahead if it’s not.
Yaboot shipped in the ISOs
If you’re one of those really unlucky people who can’t get GRUB to load andthere is no workaround (such one of those described in the FAQ), you can nowuse
yaboot
to boot the image. The default is obviously GRUB, but you canbring it up manually, e.g.:Of course, that doesn’t mean
yaboot
is supported in the installer; it’s stillold and obsolete, and doesn’t play nice with the rest of the system (and thusrequires manual maintenance). However, it allows you to get the ISO booted,install the system without having it set up the bootloader, and set it upafterwards by hand.G5 Mac Pro
Fewer graphical flavor images
Since generating all those graphical flavor images took way too long, neededa ton of space, and some of them didn’t even work for various reasons, we areno longer shipping graphical flavors with the exception of Xfce. Keep in mindthat this only applies to the live images! You can still install thedesktop environment of your choice in the final system, of course.
Other minor stuff
The graphical flavor images for 32-bit PowerPC now ship Xorg drivers forRage 128 (
r128
) and Rage Pro (mach64
). This could help some G3s andso on, but do keep in mind that it won’t likely start up out of the box,as the drivers always needed manual configuration (Xorg modelines, etc.)There have also been assorted fixes in the installer, such as simpler andmore robust code that takes care of setting up the NVRAM stuff to make Voidboot as the default OS. And obviously, the software stack is fresh and updated.
That’s it for now. Grab a copy from the Download page, and test it if you havethe hardware. Any issues go into the bug tracker as always, and we have an IRCchannel as well (
#voidlinux-ppc
on Freenode).Linux For Ppc G5 Mac Pro
Next batch will come once enough crucial fixes have accumulated, or once itstarts getting dated again.