On 12/10/18, Stewart C. Russell via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On 2018-12-06 10:35 a.m., William Porquet wrote:
I have a similar boat-anchor Mac G5. Lubuntu PPC works quite well on it. I can't upgrade from 16 to 18 yet, doesn't seem to be supported or the distro isn't ripe yet.
Good to know, thanks. I've installed Lubuntu 16.04 as powerpc64, but I can't get past yaboot. I hold Option (⌥) when powering up to get to the boot selection screen, choose the Linux HD (it even has a tiny penguin!), pick 'l' from yaboot … and I'm back at the boot selection screen again. Continue until patience runs out.
Do you use the OpenFirmware boot? Did you stick with 32 bit?
I spent some quality time with OpenFirmware (a.k.a. OF) / yaboot / debian on the G5. Here are a few hopefully useful tidbits. Generally, - /etc/yaboot.conf contains instructions to *both* linux "yabin" and to yaboot itself. - ybin is run under linux and takes *some* of the config items from yaboot.conf and generates a script that OF runs, called ofboot.b. It also creates and populates a boot partition on the target disk. - The rest of yaboot.conf, including kernel "image" specs, is used by yaboot itself during boot. - yaboot is executed *by* OF. The approach I've taken is to allow the debian jessie installation to generate a half-assed (= almost, but not totally broken) yaboot.conf, but also useful Apple_Bootstrap partition containing ofboot.b, yaboot.conf, and yaboot. I then experimented with modifying ofboot.b and yaboot.conf *directly* on the HFS partition. For example, this is a typical sequence of update events: # hmount /dev/sda2 # hls -l # hcopy ./yaboot.conf bootstrap:yaboot.conf # hattrib -t conf bootstrap:yaboot.conf # hcopy ./ofboot.b bootstrap:ofboot.b # hattrib -t tbxi bootstrap:ofboot.b # hls -l # humount /dev/sda2 Here are some salient fragments of the configurations I needed to poke to make my setup work. My original OSX is on /dev/sda3, and my Linux distro is on /dev/sdb3. In ofboot.b: <BOOT-SCRIPT> : .printf fb8-write drop ; : 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 ; : bootmacosx " Booting MacOSX..." .printf 100 ms load-base release-load-area " /ht@0,f2000000/pci@9/k2-sata-root@c/@ffffffffffffffff/@0:3,\\:tbxi" $boot ; " screen" output Note the horrible "/ht@0,f2000000/pci@9/k2-sata-root@c/@ffffffffffffffff/@0:2,\\yaboot" specification. This is OF for "/dev/sda2", which is where my config and yaboot reside. This script, run by OF, tells OF that yaboot can be booted from /dev/sda2, and that OSX can be booted directly from /dev/sda3. Next, yaboot.conf: boot="/dev/sda2" # The device spec of the second hard disk (B, or the bottom slot) device=/ht@0,f2000000/pci@9/k2-sata-root@c/k2-sata@1/disk@0 partition=3 root="UUID=uuid of your root partition" timeout=300 install=/usr/lib/yaboot/yaboot magicboot=/usr/lib/yaboot/ofboot image=/boot/vmlinux-4.9.0-0.bpo.6-powerpc64 label=LinuxBpo read-only initrd=/boot/initrd.img-4.9.0-0.bpo.6-powerpc64 initrd-size=8192 image=/boot/vmlinux-3.16.0-6-powerpc64 label=Linux3 read-only initrd=/boot/initrd.img-3.16.0-6-powerpc64 initrd-size=8192 Note that if your linux partition is on the first hard disk, your device spec would be: device=/ht@0,f2000000/pci@9/k2-sata-root@c/k2-sata@0/disk@0 partition=<your linux root fs partition number> I hope this isn't too scattered - Take a look at your own installation (mac-fdisk -l /dev/sda etc.) and your installed ofboot.b and yaboot.conf in light of the above. Ping back if you get stuck. Cheers, Mike