Re: Installing snapshot 2021-01-03 on a PowerMac G5
Hello Johannes!
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?
> My attempts were not that lucky at all because each turn of trying to install the
> snapshot mentioned failed.
>
> I’m listing my observations here. Please tell me if and where to post logs and/or
> bug reports. Thank you.
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 issues I observed:
>
> 1. partman did not create a boot/HFS partition the `/usr/lib/os-probes` tests could recognize.
> It seems these scripts utilize `blkid`, but `blkid` would only recognize my boot partition (2MB)
> as HFS after I manually formatted it using `hformat`.
> 2. Selecting KDE as environment in tasksel did not work (seems not all dependencies could be resolved,
> but I did not dig deeper into this), I chose Xfce, using that installation worked.
What was the error message you got when installing KDE? Such installability issues can occur in
Debian unstable and they are usually transient. They usually occur when a new version of KDE
(or any other larger package set) gets updated and the buildds haven't churned through all
updated packages yet or the package archives have not synced yet.
> 3. But whatever I did (even after fixing first issue), I did not manage to install grub. I even
> tried the „ugly hack“, mentioned at https://www.u58733p55594.web0093.zxcs-klant.nl/installation/
> grub-problem/ to replace hfsprogs with an older snapshot within the target chroot. The result
> stayed the same:
>
> ```
> grub-installer: info: Running chroot /target grub-install --force "dummy"
> grub-installer: Installing for powerpc-ieee1275 platform.
> grub-installer: grub-install: error:
> grub-installer:
> grub-installer: cannot find a GRUB drive for dummy. Check your device.map
> grub-installer: .
> grub-installer: error: Running 'grub-install --force "dummy"' failed.
> ```
>
> If you need the full syslog, partman log and so on, just tell me where to upload/store it.
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.
Adrian
> [1] https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=linux&suite=sid
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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