Re: Debian sid testing progress
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On August 14, 2018 5:29 AM, Rogério Brito <rbrito@ime.usp.br> wrote:
> 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?
I've got Midori (installed from Jessie-Backports; installs fine) and Luakit (latest build; compiled on my iBook) working at a decent clip. Firefox-ESR is unstable and crashes on occasion (as well as being slowwww on 32-bit PowerPC), qutebrowser segfaults when using the older qtwebkit backend (qtwebengine, IIRC, needs to be reconfigured and built for PowerPC, but luakit is too similar for me to really bother, and it may be out of my own abilities to do so), Epiphany/Web only displays garbage instead of websites, and everything else is just way too outdated to be of any use.
>
> 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).
Will do.
>
> > 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".
Hmm... video in browsers seems to exhibit the old blue-hued, big endian Mesa (or gstreamer; not exactly sure which) bug from years past. My work-around is to use youtube-dl and download 360p mp4 video from YT (and Video Downloadhelper for everywhere else), and play them through mpv or VLC. They run at full speed in that resolution for me; even on my 867mhz TiBook AND at full screen, so I'm not sure what your issues are/were. I have installed all of the gstreamer plugins (good, bad, ugly), but I'm somewhat flying blind with those, as I don't completely understand gstreamer yet and have some reading to do. Any issues I initially had with video were solved by installing firmware-linux-nonfree.
Brian
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