Installing MODERN DEBIAN on a Power Mac G5!

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Today we're going to try and install Debian 11 Sid on a PowerMac G5, which is known to have a broken bootloader and almost installing from the netinstall CD. The catch is - I've already successfully installed it once, but I don't remember exactly how I did it. So today, let's try to reproduce the install for posterity, and then explore bleeding-edge Debian Linux on a 20 year old Power Mac!
LINKS:
🍎 Download Debian Sid for ppc64: cdimage.debian...
🍎 Debian Sid MacRumors forum: forums.macrumo...
🍎 The PowerProgress community: www.powerprogr...
🍎 TinkerDifferent: tinkerdifferen...
INSTRUCTIONS TO INSTALL & FIX BOOTLOADER:
1. Boot from the Debian ppc64 Netinstall ISO linked above
2. Choose "Default Install"
3. Run through the simple prompts in the installer, use the full disk during partitioning, and choosing all defaults is fine.
4. When you get the message about GRUB install failing, IMMEDIATELY press Alt-F2 to open a console, and hit enter to start it.
5. Type the following:
chroot /target
wget repo.powerprog...
chmod u+x grubfix32.sh
./grubfix32.sh /dev/sda2 (or whatever your partition was called during partitioning)
6. If you see "GRUB installed with no errors reported" in the wall of text, you're good! Press Alt-F1 to go back to the install, and choose "Install without bootloader"
7. Run through the rest of the prompts, and reboot into your shiny new Debian install!
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#Macintosh #Linux #PowerPC

Опубликовано:

29 сен 2024

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Комментарии : 409

@genkiadrian 2 года назад

I'm the author of these installation images. I haven't watched the video yet, but the GRUB fix should no longer be necessary. Make sure to use the latest images as of today (2022-03-28). Users have reported that installation on a PowerMac G5 worked without any need for a workaround. Edit: The "Illegal Instruction" in OBS Studio means that the application is using instructions the G5 doesn't understand. Most likely the code tries to use some POWER7 or POWER8 instructions. This should be fixable, I will have a look.

@ActionRetro 2 года назад

Wow, thanks for stopping by! Amazing! I'm definitely going to give it a fresh try.

@genkiadrian 2 года назад

@@ActionRetro Thanks for the kind words. If you have questions, feel free to post them to the debian-powerpc mailing list. To give a little background on the GRUB issue: GRUB uses a completely different mechanism for booting Linux as compared to a standard PC. On a PowerMac, setting up GRUB involves creating a separate HFS partition, installing the GRUB first-stage bootloader files and "blessing" them with a special utility. In order to create an HFS filesystem, I'm using Apple's own hfsprogs sources from MacOS X which have been ported to Linux. I also restored Legacy HFS support in these tools because Apple removed them in a later version. Then I needed to get the partition layout right and figure out how to properly bless the files. And eventually, everything had to be integrated into debian-installer which is quite a tedious process due to all the small bits and pieces that need to fit together. So, that's why it took quite some time to get the GRUB installation process right. Previously, Debian used Yaboot on PowerMac but that's no longer supported by its developer. And most people are more familiar with GRUB anyway which is why I switched Debian on PowerMac over to GRUB. Oh, as for the graphics issues: Try installing the package "firmware-amd-graphics" from the non-free section (you may have to enable "contrib" and "non-free" in your /etc/apt/sources.list first). Most radeon cards need the firmware package installed to be able to run with full performance. I will address the firmware issue in future releases, meaning that the firmware will be installed automatically then. PS: Since this is a retro channel, we're also maintaining Debian for other old architectures such as Alpha, PA-RISC or even Motorola 68000. You can actually install a current release of Debian unstable on an old 68k Mac if you're brave enough ;).

@DistrosProjects 2 года назад

@@genkiadrian Are you also the maintainer of Debian PowerPC 32-bit? The same fix should work on that afaik. If not, who is (if anyone?) Also, I can't find the image on the debian ports server. Only one from 2018.

@babyboomertwerkteam5662 2 года назад

@@DistrosProjects you need the one on Debian's cdimage server under /cdimage/ports/current (sorry I cannot paste link, my comments keep getting eaten when I try)

@GuidoRRolonA 2 года назад

Hi all, i'm using debian-11.0.0-ppc64-NETINST-1.iso, installation completes OK, with no errors, NO boot, cant apply patch, any help welcomed

@PineappleForFun 2 года назад

Man, I love the way you work on machines. This is going to come off sarcastic but I swear I mean it sincerely: it totally makes me nostalgic for high school 20 years ago when I was hot swapping IDE drives because CD-R drives were rare so I'd pay a friend 20 bucks to borrow his for the weekend. It zapped my PC with a giant spark, the thing wouldn't turn on anymore and then like a week later started working again like nothing happened. The dangling drives and cardboard shims just bring back memories.

@IvoXr Год назад

Damn, I want to know if your friend is a billionaire today if he was charging you $20 for you to borrow his drive 20 years ago :D

@naderz4064 11 месяцев назад

Those were the days

@nilswegner2881 2 года назад

One easy way to show if 3d acceleration is available is to run "glxinfo | less" and scroll to the Renderer String. if it shows "llvmpipe" it's using the cpu to software render 3d, if the string is intel, nvidia or radeon something, it's using the GPU.

@der0keks 2 года назад

glxinfo | grep 'renderer string'

@nilswegner2881 2 года назад

@@der0keks while that also works, searching for the renderer String by Hand Shows you Lots of other information, that you'd need to manually grep for If you wanted that information.

@pum6454 2 года назад

1:10 WAIT YOU GOT A 20th ANNIVERSARY MAC??? That’s insane wtf I wanna see this upcoming video so bad

@brandonupchurch7628 2 года назад

The image is a Gnu (or wildebeest)

@CyroTheSpider 2 года назад

Hi Sean, you're not going to get any acceleration out of a 9200. Mesa has retired support for the R100 and R200 series a while ago. You need at least an R300 series GPU which got introduced in mid-2002. The kernel drivers are still in, however, so you still get modesetting support (and an actual picture).

@pjsampras7072 2 года назад

The only alternative PPC OS that I can get those older ATI radeons working with accelerated graphics is MorphOS

@BestSpatula 2 года назад

Your channel has improved IMMENSELY since you got your new setup. You are a talented presenter! Kudos!

@Magnetik_moto 2 года назад

5:22 Isn't GNU's logo just a... gnu? That would make sense :D

@ukmk3supra 2 года назад

My guess would be that the Radeon 9200 is on a PCI bus, for starters. AGP will have a massive bandwidth increase in comparison. Secondly, the Radeon 9200 lacks a lot of the hardware the window manager is going to want to use for compositing desktop elements. Try the desktops again, but with a better card like the Radeon X800 or GeForce 7800GS - they'll take a lot of the heavyweight compositing load off the CPU for a more resource efficient system, for everything from the window manager to hardware acceleration in the browser.

@CyroTheSpider 2 года назад

Not really - I already commented what the actual problem is. Mesa simply dropped support for anything older than the R300 chips a few months ago (it wasn't working entirely properly according to my tests anyways), so he's running on pure software acceleration. The 9200 has an R200 based chip. R300 based GPUs were introduced in mid-2002, they started with the Radeon 9700. Linux still includes the kernel driver for the R100 and R200 based graphics cards, however, meaning you do get an actual picture and modesetting capabilities - but that's not really enough for a modern DE.

@xbinxpurp6118 2 года назад

HP Fire GL X3 flashed w x800xt reduced rom is much cheaper option than an x800xt and you dont need to plug in external power =]

@simonvannarath 2 года назад

OBS Studio for Linux requires at a minimum a graphics card that is OpenGL 3.3 capable. I'm not sure if any PPC/OpenFirmware-equipped graphics card supported it.

@virtualtools_3021 2 года назад

far as i know most modern card is x1900 gt, it has partial "Support" for opengl 3.0 and 3.1

@alfiegordon9013 2 года назад

would open AMD drivers work on a ppc this old? i know they do on POWER9

@fsfs555 2 года назад

Good info. Looks like it's the GF 8000 series and derivative Quadro FXes (not the FX 4500, sadly, since it's GF 7800-based) and Radeon HD family are the minimums for OpenGL 3.3 support, basically. And there were no PPC cards among them, either Apple OE or flashed. If you have some handy, maybe you could attempt to use a PC video card to see if it loads the desktop (once Debian boots; without a PPC/OpenFirmware video BIOS you won't get any image until the drivers load so you'd better make sure your install works/have a second supported video card before attempting).

@simonvannarath 2 года назад

@@alfiegordon9013 probably unlikely due to POWER9 being both little endian and 64-bit. PowerPC 32-bit hasn't been a tested let alone being looked at by the driver developers for a really long time.

@alfiegordon9013 2 года назад

@@simonvannarath ah yeah, didn’t think about endianness.

@brandonupchurch7628 2 года назад

It's funny now how Gnome 2 which is what MATE is a fork of is considered lightweight, because back when Gnome 2 was out it was a fairly heavy full featured DE, although I think it was the peak of Linux Desktop Environments, after Gnome2 and KDE 3.5, everything just got bloated and they started caring more about "oooh shiny" versus, hey this works great and is very functional and still looks decent enough.

@jefffrasca4054 2 года назад

Ha! 12 years ago, I was using Enlightenment E16 because compared to Gnome2 and KDE3.5 and 4, it was light weight, but 20-25 years ago, E16 was super heavy weight. Oh how perceptions change.

@fzerowipeoutlover 2 года назад

That's why I use Ubuntu MATE on my gaming laptop because I missed GNOME 2

@kaitlyn__L 2 года назад

@@jefffrasca4054 I’m reminded of how C was considered a high level programming language when it was new. Now it’s the lowest level non-assembly language!

@linuxization4205 2 года назад

I still wonder how people get Gnome 40 running at 60 fps.

@TheSulross 2 года назад

this channel has now established itself as THE preeminent authority for Linux and BSD on PowerPC Mac hardware; what a proud accomplishment, hey

@40percentyt 2 года назад

I daily Plasma and that looks like something in the rendering pipeline is broken. Thumbnails are generated using some library, and they had the same discoloration. Dolphin doesn't use hardware acceleration, explaining why it was unaffected. *Disabling the compositor in KDE's Display settings may fix this and improve performance.*

@motheroats 2 года назад

Random person walking by: “so ur into pain then, right? Ur into BDSM” Me: “No I’m into something worse than pain, I’m into Linux BSD on vintage PPC computers for literally no reason other than fulfilling a prophecy that most many not understand but those that do treasure with their lives”

@kaitlyn__L 2 года назад

Too true, some of these installs are way more masochistic than BDSM 😂

@eduardoavila646 2 года назад

It would be cool to compare minecraft on this g5 mac with mac os vs debian 11. It would be interesting if newer drivers, and a more recent kernel, and perhaps a lightweight system would gain a few fps'.

@jefffrasca4054 2 года назад

The trick there is to custom compile a kernel. Strip out everything you don't need and get a leaner system. It would also be fun to do that with a custom tuned BSD kernel.

@polypolyman 2 года назад

Not a Yak, it's a Gnu of course!

@turbolenza35 2 года назад

Please inform your viewers that Linux ppc does NOT support smp (dual cpu) power Mac.

@xerzy 2 года назад

Question: are you sure you're not missing GPU drivers? Because there was a related error that popped up when you ran the script and KDE and GNOME show (in fact, GNOME disables animations when running with CPU software graphics, and indeed you have the animations off)

@MistahMatzah 2 года назад

The Debian installer has been broken on PPC forever. I remember having exactly the same problem in the early 2000s. I don't know what's crazier, that the official installer still doesn't work, or that you managed to get it going! Why'd you yank the 7800GS out? Is it not supported?

@dreamyuki 2 года назад

maybe you forgot to install firmware-amd, because debian by default doesnt come with firmware for amdgpu

@Elflavio92 2 года назад

Using olden memes in the title? You're showing you age! But then again, so am I. Great video! I love seeing Linux breathe life into this beautiful machines.

@ActionRetro 2 года назад

I respect our elder memes 😂

@kbhasi 2 года назад

I'm looking at the list of unofficial ports, and I'm amazed. Not just PowerPC 32 and 64 bit, but DEC Alpha, PA-RISC (HP 9000 series), Itanium, SPARC 64-bit, and even 68k?!?! 🤯 Wow. Debian on DEC Alpha and HP 9000 systems?! Sun/Oracle workstations too? I'm also going to guess that the 68k port was the result of work by some members of the Amiga enthusiast community, but could also be the work of the X68000 and/or vintage Mac communities. Wow. (18:46) Arctic Fox is actually a fork of Pale Moon 27, in turn whose version 25 was a fork of Firefox ESR 24. I know this as I've seen another video talking about Arctic Fox for Mac, and Pale Moon is my preferred Web browser, though I can tell when a website was only designed with Google Chrome in mind when it doesn't play nice in Pale Moon, but plays nice in Firefox, which in turn is my secondary Web browser. Pale Moon 29 dropped support for legacy Firefox extensions that were never updated for it, if I recall correctly.

@fohkukohgeki 2 года назад

the GNU logo is a gnu, aka a wildebeest

@canopus5498 2 года назад

I tried the 32bit version on an MDD and got to choosing the install method. But going with default install, it really quickly shows an error like, „could not find pha“ and then black screens, any idea?

@zaxchannel2834 2 года назад

My favorite lightweight environment is wmaker. It's surprisingly fast but difficult to configure. It is heavily inspired by NeXT so it's about as close to Mac as one can get on Linux/BSD

@pocotoodino 2 года назад

MintPPC’s Debian variant installation script normally works, instead standard Debian Sid

@pjsampras7072 2 года назад

Another Linux PPC variant built on-top of Debian SID is Fienix

@AWalYT 2 года назад

A few years ago I remember installing Debian 6 on a G3. The experience was slow there but still kind of just worked anyways, which really is always the charm of Linux...

@jlj945 2 года назад

I would assume OBS is expecting little endian PPC, not big endian. That would explain the illegal instruction error.

@beeffeter456 2 года назад

I’m very excited to work on two powermac G5s I got for free essentially because they unfortunately got bent up in shipping. The internals seem good in both but the cases are quite damaged which needed a little fixing. One is a 2.5 quad and the other is a 2.0. They were bought untested but one shows signs of life at least, so now I’m waiting for the power cord for the quad. I got them just because I think they are awesome machines, and I really want a piece of the community that keeps PPC alive.

@beeffeter456 2 года назад

Also, I have no idea if the dexcool in the quad has crystallized and clotted the system cooling yet but I guess I’ll find out soon.

@darthrevan2063 2 года назад

Man I really want a quad version of the g5 but all the stories I’ve read/heard make me think twice.

@virtualtools_3021 2 года назад

please check for leakage before you power on the quad!

@beeffeter456 2 года назад

@@virtualtools_3021 I did. No leakage spotted. The LCS in these things are incredibly well sealed (especially at 15+ years old).

@beeffeter456 2 года назад

@@darthrevan2063 I pulled the trigger when I saw 2 untested ones selling on eBay for 35/per. The case was originally fine, but the shipping did a massive number on them. And yeah, these things are ancient, so problems are quite common unfortunately. I guess we will see how this goes… And if you really want one, you should probably get an air cooled version. They are very reliable in comparison. I just happened to get lucky I guess.

@hrhcrab 2 года назад

Does anyone know what the issue is on a technical level? I'm not a fan of third party repos. I have Sid on a G4 and grub on that works fine with the native installer. I guess this is a PPC64 thing then. What happens if you install bullseye and then dist-upgrade to Sid?

@lepidotos 2 года назад

PPC64 is more the domain of e5500, e6500, and some stubborn POWER8/9 users; G5s do make up a decent portion of it but most software that still supports BE is switching over to POWER9 because it's the most easily accessible, if expensive, hardware.

@alexsinclair2012 2 года назад

The early SATA controller on these Apple G5 machines are picky... They don't like SATA III devices... Using an older Samsung SATA II (3Gb/s speed) device works fine. So far, This is like the only computer that has this phenomenon that I have dealt with

@Pickle136 2 года назад

another mac soul has been purified :-) I use debian on 2 PC's mainly used for NAS with OpenMediaVault. One is ARM and the other X86. When you add in docker through omv the possibilities really expand.

@kurnma3776 2 года назад

Also : If you want sudoers access on your account, don’t put a root password in the installer.

@TimotheousMaximus 2 года назад

You are knocking it out of the park with the videos lately. Fantastic presentation and very interesting topics

@lepidotos 2 года назад

I really need me a penguin like that. Especially a stuffed Adélie penguin. Probably the reason some programs throw illegal instructions or just run sluggishly is they need a POWER8 or e5500 (Amiga)/e6500 (PowerPC Notebook) processor.

@zh84 2 года назад

"Debian runs on anything!" There used to be a joke something like twenty-five years ago about installing Linux on a dead badger.

@denniswoycheshen 2 года назад

Doom would fly on that dead badger for sure....

@MrLurchsThings 2 года назад

I had no idea is was pronounced mar-tay . As an Aussie I always assume it was Mate (although to pronounce that properly - maaaaaaaate)

@Natomon01 2 года назад

I'm not a Mac type of person. Though, I am a Linux type! It's all for the thrill of doing something you're not "supposed" to do. Whether it's playing a game through a compatibility-layer like Wine or Proton, or simply breathing new life into hardware that the OEM would rather you forget about.

@SimonQuigley 2 года назад

Nibbles is probably based on the qbasic game from DOS :-)

@TerryGrancho Месяц назад

It's a Gnu... Also called Wildebeest, but they are using the word Gnu, how in the world you didn't see that, aren't you supposed to be a genius? Lmao

@spcwingo 2 года назад

You said that you installed Debian 11, but also said that you installed Sid. Which is it? 11 is Bullseye (current stable), what will become 12 is Bookworm (current testing), and what will never become a release is Sid (Unstable).

@ShiggitayMediaProductions 2 года назад

Oh mannnn seeing GNOME 40 drag @$$ like that was painful to watch! haha I actually run GNOME 41, but on MUCH NEWER and x86-64 hardware... I have an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X with 32 GB of RAM haha, so ofc it runs well, but that was so sad seeing it struggle like that. KDE being janky too was interesting/sad. Still, though... This was interesting to see a 20 year old G5 running a modern spin of Linux...Next challenge/shenanigan? Compile Gentoo Linux from scratch on that very G5! hahah! Keep it up!

@sadmac356 2 года назад

Oh dear…Gentoo on it…ouch

@ShiggitayMediaProductions 2 года назад

@@sadmac356 YAAAS make that old man Mac suffer!

@michaelharmon8731 Год назад

I've tried following these instructions and found both German and both Korean repositories are down. I'm unable to wget the grub fixer script because the CD install doesn't contain wget. The minimal os in the CD installer doesn't have wget or apt, so I'm kinda stuck. Any chance you could post an update video with this in mind?

@UpLateGeek 2 года назад

Is OBS still OBS anymore, or has the commercial fork OBS Studio destroyed them with their attempt to steal the trademark OBS from them? (Hint: use OBS, not OBS studio - don't support greedy commercial forks of real open-source software!)

@daspec 2 года назад

Now all we need is a boot .ISO with all of that done automagically :-)

@kingeternal_ap 2 года назад

I bet there is a blob binary in that script, a closed firmware to actually boot into the ???/grub folder. That's why it's not merged into that installer. It's not open source! (That's debian for you.)

@Mil_UwU 2 года назад

I did a similar thing recently on my G5 Xserve… ended up giving up on the installer and using raspbian on a raspberry pi to partition up an SSD and then debootstrap to install a base system onto it, then i had to chroot into it on the pi with qemu and install a kernel, yaboot, and a few other things - but sure enough it did eventually boot when I put the SSD back into the Xserve!!

@annhell 2 года назад

5:30 It's not a yak, it's a gnu (a.k.a. wildebeest). You know, a gnu, because it's Debian GNU/Linux.

@paulwratt 2 года назад

Not a Yak, the GNU logo is an actual Gnu (named after the sound they make - which is another name for the Wilderbeast), hence its use as the GNU logo ...

@dungeonseeker3087 2 года назад

You should be able to override the default kernel governor pretty easily. Try sudo apt get cpu-freq first as it comes with a nice GUI but if not (not 100% sure if its available on debian though it really should be) you can add a flag to the kernel startup by editing /etc/default/grub then recreating a fresh grub.cfg

@ffoninamhcar24 2 года назад

Someone below already commented about it, but the video problem that I ran into years ago when putting old ubuntu ppc64 ports on mac G3, G4 or G5, was that ATI never released non-apple powerpc code or source for their proprietary video cards, like it wasn't cost effective for them to put more time into developing the open or ppc drivers for those cards, or something, so I was almost always stuck using the frambuffer fbdev but that often performed or looked better than the non-accellerated radeon driver. Anybody know of good alternative PPC64 compatible video upgrades for this computer? other radeon or nvidia that are compatible? I bet someone could hobby or maker an >= openGL 3.3 video card capable of being accessed by ppc64 system, I would be interested, as I still have two or three of these G5s and some older G4s..

@rootbeer666 2 года назад

I have a G5 as well, but I don't bother with Linux on it. There's no motive. Just about any surplus PC will be better at it.

@MarcoGPUtuber 2 года назад

Bonkers upgrades? Extremely rare computer? It is a travesty you are not at a million subs yet.

@ShiggitayMediaProductions 2 года назад

Ehhh PowerMac G5s aren't really that rare though... if you're referring to Sean's other experiments, then yes. lol.

@MarcoGPUtuber 2 года назад

@@ShiggitayMediaProductions You gotta watch the video. He wasn't referring to the Power Mac G5 as rare.

@ShiggitayMediaProductions 2 года назад

@@MarcoGPUtuber I have watched this video.... whatchu talkin bout Willis?

@MarcoGPUtuber 2 года назад

@@ShiggitayMediaProductions 1:08.....

@RetrocompuTink 2 года назад

Great! Just installed Sid on my iSight iMac G5 (17) - and it is working like a charm. Did go with XFCE though to have best compromise between lightweight and usability ... regarding the GRUB install error, it is interesting that the stock installer refers to /sda3 ... maybe this is where the problem comes from. And it is really a shame to see where the Internet did take us ... a 1.9 GHz (that is Billion Hz) CPU locked at 100% to render a webpage ...

@kacpreusz9911 2 года назад

Debian 10 actually works a lot better from my experience than Debian 11. 11 has trouble with old ATI graphics and 10 works perfectly

@dpanterdpanter 2 года назад

Excellent video! Despite abusing the machine with Gnome 40, you've earned an easy sub from me. Cheers! :)

@danaeckel 2 года назад

Wow that is awesome! What did you do when it asked for firmware? I have been fighting with Debian 11 on an iMac G5 for quite some time now. I can't get it to read the DVD or CD-R It worked for Adelie, but not Debian. I would still love to see NetBSD 9 run on a 68040 with X11. I had NetBSD 6 on Quadra 800, but never got X up.

@zenmaster24 2 года назад

man the cheesegrater powermac is such a beautiful machine - much prefer the look it to the new version. this case with the internals of an arm mac pro would be heaven

@NatetheAceOfficial 2 года назад

5:16 - The nice GNU....... Gnu!

@pablogonzales6194 2 года назад

even freebsd supports big endian ppc64 hardware :-)

@noahisamathnerd 2 года назад

The MATE desktop is pronounced /meɪt/, not /mɑ te/.

@drewzero1 2 года назад

I really appreciate how thorough you are in making sure your experience is documented on platforms other than RU-vid, like when you post the information in forum threads. Way to give back to the community!

@Spozza 2 года назад

The Gnu gnu is a gnu...

@therealjpster 2 года назад

I laughed out loud when he called it a Yak. I think that's the mascot for ... Bison?

@Scoopta 2 года назад

Debian 11 is bullseye and is stable, debian sid is the rolling release with no version number which is currently tracking debian 12 bookwoorm. I haven't gotten to the point where you boot yet to see what was actually installed but the statement "debian 11 sid" is slightly confusing as it's a contradiction.

@kingeternal_ap 2 года назад

"Debian rolling release, SID" *NO. no. Bad idea!*

@MarcoGPUtuber 2 года назад

My old Power Mac G5 still has Debian on it from when I was experimenting many years ago.

@TomZelickman 2 года назад

I wonder if you could put in a newer graphics card and see how things perform. I know that's not really in line with what you usually do with these older machines but I bet you could get a lot of daily use out of that machine with the upgraded graphics.

@3rdalbum 2 года назад

Putting in a newer graphics card is actually precisely the kind of thing he does with these older machines :P

@ab.3800 2 года назад

Just fyi MATE is a fork of GNOME 2 lol Gnome 2 was the standard for ubuntu before the unity bs

@CommodoreFan64 2 года назад

MATE is awesome being of my favorite DE's, and was my go to for years before Budgie on Solus Linux came around, and got good with a little bit more modern interface.

@ab.3800 2 года назад

@@CommodoreFan64 gnome2/mate was my introduction to Linux DE with like Ubuntu 7 lol now I use a variety of DE from xfce to i3wm on my thinkpad

@jdos2 2 года назад

PReP and CHRP booting nightmare flashbacks with this video! It was always so hard to get Linux running on RS/6000 and Mac PowerPCs.

@minecrafttheobjectno541 2 года назад

It's Debian 11 Bullseye, not Debian 11 Sid, Sid is reserved for the rolling release version of Debian, Unstabe...

@ActionRetro 2 года назад

This is unstable

@kbhasi 2 года назад

(15:44) Wow, that reminds me of the Debian 8 installation I have on my old ThinkPad R51, where I chose almost every desktop environment the former officially supported, with the exceptions being GNOME and KDE Plasma, then I also installed Trinity too, and a bunch of window managers too. The environments I spent the most time in on that installation were MATE (dressed up to look like Red Hat Linux 9 since Debian 8 shipped a GTK2-based version), followed by FVWM (using mostly default Debian 8 config), and Trinity (from official Trinity repositories).

@Arjuna93 Год назад

How about FreeBSD? Not interested in Linux personally, but BSD could be worth trying.

@ActionRetro Год назад

BSD on PowerPC Macs is awesome. I had a totally usable experience on a 333mhz iMac G3 with BSD and Dillo browser

@DarkMastaC 2 года назад

After all your experience with Linux which distro do you think it the best currently? I'm trying to figure out how I want to setup my G5. I have been considering a multi-boot setup but I feel more then one linux wouldnt make sense. I will probably go with KDE seeing as its what I use on my main rig and doesnt seem as bloated as GNOME funny how before GNOME 3 my opinion on the matter was reversed.

@kaitlyn__L 2 года назад

If you keep your home folder on a separate partition from the root partition, you can reinstall different distros without affecting your user files :)

@ananon5771 2 года назад

this stuff is always great,bringing older hardware to tip top shape is one of the best uses for linux (especially if you don't feel any urgency to switch from windows or mac on your main machine).

@InfiniteLoop 2 года назад

Wow, I’ve got that same machine, if I knew how to make it dual boot Debian and OS X I’d definitely do it.

@RobReynolds 2 года назад

"Does it run Debian Linux"? I thought the game was "can I install netbsd on it?" Great video. Top work!

@ps5hasnogames55 2 года назад

Debian is the NetBSD of the Linux world. Runs on anything and everything (well, ok, not *eeeeverything*, NetBSD still wins there...)

@coleshores 2 года назад

That giant machine has all the horsepower of a Raspberry Pi 4

@kaitlyn__L 2 года назад

The wonders of miniaturisation, eh?

@coleshores 2 года назад

@@kaitlyn__L yeah it’s honestly mind blowing

@ellienore 2 года назад

Impressive how this G5 can be used as a daily driver with Debian!

@nyteshade 5 дней назад

Would be nice to see you setup some VM environments from Linux that boot Tiger or Leopard and possibly OS9. I mean it’s YDL so MoL (Mac on Linux) isn’t prepped but a good performant setup would let us use PowerPC Linux as the root OS while still enjoying a lot of native Mac software without sacrifice.

@CodyShell 2 года назад

Back at my mom's house I have our old iMac G5. I had a Ubuntu on it years ago, it must have been 10.04. next time I'm home I'm going to bring that sucker home and give this a try!

@phipli 2 года назад

That would be the GNU Gnu :)

@davidg5898 2 года назад

Right. A yak is a type of Asian ox, while a gnu is in the antelope family.

@osnapitzsamd 2 года назад

If this was more polished, then I'm surprised to say... it might actually be a usable PC, twenty years after its release! On Mac OS X, that Mac is not usable anymore, and while I don't like Linux, it might actually work quite well.

@jakubpouzar3365 2 года назад

Great guide! I was just struggling to install FreeBSD on my dual G5 when I came across your video. Now I've got an almost finished Debian installation. Btw, the installer is bootable from USB using the command boot ud:,\\:tbxi

@mrpcwilly 2 года назад

Firefox esr 79 and Firefox 86 run on debian ppc64 however with inverted colours for some images (endian bug), however they play videos incredibly well and without colour issues

@Jasontyo 2 года назад

here for future seinfeld mac video

@DouglasWalrath 2 года назад

debian 11 is bullseye, not sid

@SimonQuigley 2 года назад

Right, but Sid is unstable, and once it becomes stable it's given a number and name, so it was Sid previously :-)

@draggonhedd 2 года назад

Its a GNU Gnu (Wildebeest)

@zeromold 2 года назад

Very funny to see this now. A couple of weeks ago I did the same thing with a G5 (7,2) I picked up with a 23” ADC monitor on a Nvidia 5200 card. No help from any third party script, I slogged my way through a manual grub install. You have got the key ingredient though, get a chroot shell while the installer is running so you can install and configure grub on the new filesystem. It was not trivial figuring this out manually but I will give the script a try on a different drive. Also I did not let the installer finish but rebooted after the grub install. That was a mistake as I then had to go back and manually do all the clean up that d-i does. I also did a manual install of Void PPC on another drive which was straight forward, quick and successful on the first try. Too bad they have decided to drop support for big endian ppc. Very nice and usable. I never booted the G5 from a optical drive but from usb with open firmware. You can also boot your system from open firmware. I also checked out Fienix. Does anyone know if that is still being developed? That was by far the easiest install for a G5.

@esseferio 2 года назад

24:37 and 24:45 Déjà vu ? :)

@korgied 2 года назад

Maybe try and see if "strace obs" helps figure out what it's trying to do. strace is awesome. Disclaimer: I've only used strace on AMD64 machines.

@macinjosh2223 2 года назад

Will never forget when you acidentally two of these 😅

@ActionRetro 2 года назад

😂 old timer right here!

@kaitlyn__L 2 года назад

Accidentally the whole Linux

@Azurael 2 года назад

I run Gentoo on my G5 quad. Takes an age to compile some of the bigger packages and cross compiling with distcc on x86 hardware is very hit-and-miss for me. Since some of the more recent updates to the radeon kernel drivers, everything now works properly running a Gnome/Wayland desktop. The only gotcha is that the original GeForce 6200 doesn't work very well with Nouveau for a modern DE - it was terribly laggy, flickery and had some colour inversions so I have a Radeon HD 5450 installed in addition which works fine and looks a lot more responsive than your attempts to run Gnome here - I just blacklist the Nouveau kernel module since the Open Firmware won't allow the system to boot without a supported GPU with a real OF-compatible VBIOS and a display connected to said card (I just use a DVI-VGA adapter with a bunch of resistors stuck in it so it thinks there's one connected) - my next project is finding a newer Radeon card with DisplayPort 1.2 or HDMI 2.0 so I can get my UHD displays running at their native resolution, but even old GPUs are a bit expensive for a just-for-fun experiment like this at the moment and the ones I could 'borrow' from another machine require 2x PCIe power connectors where the G5 only has one. I do recall having some difficulty getting Grub installed, but the initial install was so long ago I don't know if they've fixed the install scripts yet. One oddity is that the native 1.5Gbit SATA interface on this machine seems to hate SATA 6Gbit SSDs, I'm not sure I recall ever having the same problems with early x86 SATA interfaces. Anyway, I settled on an old 80GB Intel X18M 3Gbit drive I had laying around after failing with all of the more modern ones I had going spare.

@Ybalrid 2 года назад

The GNU logo is a gnu (a wildebeest?), not a yak. They live in the southern part of the African continent 🙂

@frantisekcerny6677 2 года назад

I hoped so much that apple going to arm will make powerpc macs more relevant, but no, this is an awesome example what comunity can do. love those macs, sadly not viable for me dur to size and power consumption, so I sold mine few years ago. Nice vid!! more of that :))

@tradito 2 года назад

A yak? Dude it's a gnu...

@skip741x3 Год назад

amazed at how effortlessly you typed off all those complex commands bro!...that alone would freeze many of us in our tracks right there..congrats !! I still think snow leapord Looks so much nicer than any linux distro but I get that it allows you a more up to date interface.

@LovelyAlanna 2 года назад

awww man, I wanted you to try Xfce

@robsyoutube Год назад

Nice trip down memory lane. I was using one of these with Debian from 2011 till 2013 before I toss it. (It was only worth about $20 then). Never ran Mac Os on it. It sure wasn't a sun sparc system but it was usable.

@foobar1979 2 года назад

Would be interesting to see youtube working on that machine as from what I recall it's just barely fast enough to play 720p h264 video on OSX so youtube would be somewhat usable.