Extending PowerPC Support.

[Andrew McCall]

On Thu, 4 Nov 2004 11:22:49 +0000, Colin Watson <cjwatson at canonical.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 03, 2004 at 12:40:55PM +0000, Andrew McCall wrote:
> 
> > I was wondering what needs to be done to extend the Ubuntu's PowerPC
> > support?  I myself have a beige G3 thats perfectly capable of running
> > Debian Linux, but support for a user-orientated distribution such as
> > Ubuntu would be even better!
> >
> > I was thinking that most of Ubuntu should work as its based on Debian,
> > but I don't know about the installer or of any applications are
> > compiled with G4 specific extensions - I presume they won't be as
> > Ubuntu runs on G3 iMac's.
> 
> To my knowledge, there are no useful extensions that could be used.
> About the only one that comes to mind is AltiVec, and that requires
> special application support and is only really useful for
> mathematically-intensive tasks.

So most things should just work out of the box - thats great!
 
> > Things that would need modifying are:
> >
> > Booting Method - BootX works perfectly for this.
> > Kernel - Normal kernel so long as its compiled with PowerPC G3 support.
> > Initrd - This would probably be where most of the work needs to take
> > place, a custom initrd would need to be created so that BootX could
> > boot into this and then start the install.
> 
> The main issues are:
> 
>   * We need floppy support. This isn't available on any Ubuntu
>     architecture right now, although it's on the list for Hoary.

I might be miss understanding things, but why do we need floppy
support?  We aren't really going to be able to use it for booting,
unless you were planning on using miBoot - so support for the floppies
on the machines doesn't seem that important to me...  Can you explain
a little?
 
>   * OldWorld systems are a royal pain to boot, and the installer needs
>     to have support for this; for example, if you're using BootX you
>     won't want to install a bootloader at all.

Indeed they are!  There have been many projects to get this done
right, quik, miBoot and BootX - BootX seems to be the most common one,
but as your probably aware needs MacOS 8/9 as a bootstrap OS. Quik
seems to be the tidest one if your using your PowerMac as a dedicated
Linux box, but seems a royal PITA to get working, if indeed it will
work with the newest version of glibc etc.

A good start would be to just support the use of BootX for now - but
as you said, you won't want to install a boot loader at all and would
need some nice clear documentation on what the user must do in the
MacOS side of things - if someone gives me a hand getting the kernels
and initrd together, I hold my hand up to the documentation and BootX
stuff.

We would need documentation on preparing the hard disks under MacOS,
installing BootX under MacOS and moving the kernel and initrd images
to the MacOS hard disk, and booting Ubuntu for the first time.  Then
during bootloader installation the installer would need to detect that
its being run on a "beige" machine and throw up a prompt and some
screenshots saying "Next time you boot, select /dev/hda7 and no initrd
under BootX".

If I can get hold of a version of CodeWarrior that will compile BootX,
I could even make a customised Ubuntu version of it.

Haiku (formally OpenBeOS) and OpenBSD seem to be looking for a nicer
way of booting these machines:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=8070400

But this is probably out of scope of this thread...

> > Can anyone clarify how much of the PowerPC installer is tied to
> > specific PowerPC hardware, for instance, would the installer detect
> > and configure the sound card in a beige G3 or would it completely
> > ignore it?
> 
> In general, the installer tries to do as much hardware detection as it
> can. If you can clarify what sound card you've got, I can make sure that
> it's detected.

I have 3 beige machines here, a PowerMac 9600/350, G3/266 and G3/300. 
If you tell me exactly what you want I can start working on getting
Ubuntu up on these machines!  The G3/266 is going to be dedicated to
getting Ubuntu up and running on it.

I think Ubuntu could really corner the PowerPC market on older
machines, Gentoo seems to be slowly dropping support for beige
machines, YellowDog have already dropped support, but most of the
biege machines are perfectly up to the task of running a medium weight
distribution like Ubuntu, combine that with the fact that its a
user-oriented distro and Ubuntu seems to make the obvious choice for
any Linux wanting PowerMac user!

-- 
Thanks,

Andrew McCall
andrew.mccall at gmail.com