G5 Linux issues

[LarBob]

I've tried all the latest GNU/Linux images that are supposed to work (Debian, Suse, Red Hat, Ubuntu) on a Power Mac G5 (tried both a PCI-X dual processor and on a quad G5), and also tried all of them on an IBM Model 9110-510 (POWER 5+), and only Red Hat's and Debian's installers would boot, and none would boot after the initial install.

I'd be interested to learn of a solution, if anyone discovers one.

I found an article about someone installing Debian 7.7.0 on their G5 so I'm gonna try that version and see if it works. I'm downloading the iso by use of jigdo right now.

 

[LarBob]

Okay, I installed Debian 7.7.0 and it worked perfectly on the first try. Something between this version and the newest must have broken something with yaboot? I'm not sure. This is interesting.

 

[rsolberg]

Is the yaboot.conf generated by the 7.7 installer identical to what you had with Jessie/8.8?

 

[LarBob]

Is the yaboot.conf generated by the 7.7 installer identical to what you had with Jessie/8.8?

It appears to be, yes.

Anyways, I now have a G5 running on the latest version of Debian (8.8 at the time of writing). Here's what I had to do:

I used jigdo to acquire the 7.7.0 DVD 1 from http://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/archive/7.7.0/powerpc/jigdo-dvd/.

Make sure your machine is updated completely by apt-get updating and then upgrading.

I started the upgrade from 7 -> 8 by changing "wheezy" to "jessie" in /etc/apt/sources.list. Make sure to uncomment the security.debian.org entries as well.

Afterwards update and upgrade again.

After this, my gnome was completely broken, the swap partition wasn't working correctly (or so it seemed), and the audio didn't work.

I installed xfce4 instead of gnome since I wanted it anyway and now that's working fine. I'm using lightdm as the display manager.

To fix the audio, run sudo rm /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.local.conf and then reboot. Make sure the PCM volume is turned up some in the xfce audio mixer or no sound will come out.

I fixed the swap partition by editing /etc/fstab and changing what it looked for from the UUID to /dev/sda4 (change it to whatever your swap is at).

After this, I have a perfectly working G5 running Debian 8.8.0. Sorry for the bad writing, I've been writing this out while playing Civ with friends so I'm not fully focused.

I made a video of the machine perfectly playing part of Bohemian Rhapsody here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhWWmTpqKdM&feature=youtu.be

If the audio sounds weird, it's just because of how I recorded it. Everything's working great! (Now I wonder what's wrong with the latest Debian installer for G5s...?)

 

[cruff]

Do you have more than one disk installed in your G5? If so, are both your Debian root partition and Yaboot installed on the first disk? Do you have Mac OS X partitions/installations on the same disk?

By the way, if you do decide to try installing Debian on the second disk, I ran into a yaboot configuration file bug.   I reported it as https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=846032.

Basically the context diff that produces a working boot from the second disk is:

10c10

< : bootyaboot " Loading second stage bootstrap..." .printf 100 ms load-base release-load-area " /ht@0,f2000000/pci@9/k2-sata-root@c/@ffffffffffffffff/@0:2,\\yaboot" $boot ;

---

> : bootyaboot " Loading second stage bootstrap..." .printf 100 ms load-base release-load-area " /ht@0,f2000000/pci@9/k2-sata-root@c/k2-sata@1/@0:2,\\yaboot" $boot ;