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 youthand 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 GRUBBoth 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 haveresolved the libparted issue.The partioner issue turned out to be rather difficult to debug but I have already localizedit to a problem in libparted.
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The grub-installer in this ISO image is not the correct one which has been patched forPowerMac 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 toat least 5.10.2 (my PowerMac G5 still runs a GeForce 6600 currently)? https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=210517Debian 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