Re: Debian sid testing progress
Hi.
It's been a while (several months) since I last updated my iBook G4 with
Debian, but I recall some stuff not working correctly and I saw those
mentioned in the thread pointed to in a previous email.
On 2018-08-13 14:29, swamprock wrote:
FWIW, I am currently trying to fix the Rust compiler on 32-bit PowerPC so
that we will eventually be able to use Firefox and Thunderbird on PowerPC
again.
That would certainly be very nice, Adrian, since without that, we have
essentially no browser on PowerPC (and, the ones that we had had many
issues that I can't recall right now).
BTW, which browsers are other people working?
Brian, if you can, please tell other people to subscribe to the list or
to use Thunderbird to read the list via news.gmane.org gateway (this
way, people don't get flooded with emails if they don't read their
emails in a timely fashion).
Nice. I wish my coding skills weren't so old-school, or I could offer help beyond just testing. It would be nice to see Quantum's speed and efficiency (to the extent that it would be effective) on PPC machines. This could possibly have a carry-over affect on TenFourFox, the Mac OS X/PowerPC fork of Firefox-ESR, as Cameron is basically left to applying security patches and optimizations to the old ESR code.
Some of the code (that is, the non-OSX parts) that Kaiser Cameron is
producing (especially the Altivec optimizations to decoding videos and
the JIT of Firefox) would be quite welcome if supplied in a clean
fashion to Mike Hommey, the Debian maintainer of Firefox (who also
happens to be an upstream developer at Mozilla).
Thanks to all involved with maintaining this port.
You're welcome. Please join us on #debian-ports on OFTC on IRC if you would
like to get into contact. New help is always welcome.
Will do, time permitting. I'll notify the MacRumors thread of your reply. Thanks!
I saw people mentioning that playing videos with mplayer, vlc etc is
slow on G4 machines. That is because packages in Debian are compiled for
the lowest common denominator, which is no Altivec at all.
Unfortunately, even if I grab the sources of the Debian ffmpeg package
and recompile it with Altivec enabled, but without the -mabi=altivec (or
something like that---don't recall exactly, since, as I said, it's been
months without touching my iBook), there is no change in performance.
Once I add that option (which changes the ABI), ffmpeg can transcode
videos 2x as fast and so on. I expect the same things to happen with
other multimedia libraries/programs (and other programs in general).
Oh, some hints to get VLC, mplayer, mpv etc. working faster on the
PowerPCs is to disable the loopfilter for H.264 videos (the "mp4"
videos) and to enable the "fast" processing of lavf.
Something like the following in your ~/.mplayer/config would help:
lavdopts=fast=1:skiploopfilter=nonref
You can substitute nonref by all (but then, the video gets very blocky).
If you can/wish, you (and other members of the forum) can probably
compile these facts as a FAQ on the Debian wiki (there is an Ubuntu wiki
about PowerPC that is likely to be outdated, but it had some good advice
that may not be appliable anymore, due to software having evolved).
https://wiki.debian.org/PowerPC/FAQ
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianOnPowerPC
https://wiki.debian.org/PowerPC/SoundCards
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCFAQ
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCKnownIssues
(Maybe unify the contents of the pages above would help and also make
clear what are the issues that are still present or not).
Ideally, some of these issues could be automated and the installs should
"just work".
Regards,
--
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 4096R/BCFCAAAA
http://cynic.cc/blog/ : github.com/rbrito : profiles.google.com/rbrito
DebianQA: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=rbrito%40ime.usp.br
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