report on running debian on ppc

hi,

please cc: me at simon.raven.TakeThisOut@gmail.com

here's a report of successful usage of debian on a couple ppc machines
i own/maintain.

i have 2 in current use, both oldworld. one's a mac clone, power tower
pro. up until
several months ago, i was booting it via quik. this works ok, but it
has issues with its
pci bus, making video on it iffy, luckily it's only a server; to get
around it, i boot
with bootx from a small mac os 9 partition, with the bootx extension
in the extensions 'folder'
on the mac partition. otherwise, this machine works fine.

the other is a beige g3, tower model. today, i was trying out grub2. i
had a pleasant surprise when i tried
to boot with grub: quik suddenly worked. as of this current boot
session this machine - which is also
a server - it has booted via quik. i did see the usual DEFAULT CATCH
error that's seen on
these machines. i had a talk with rbrito earlier today, and i had
mentioned to him/her that
quik didn't work on this machine. turns out it's working better. i
suppose that's due to
a wrong boot-device argument in the machine's OF nvram.

both of these currently run debian very well, with varied hardware
attached, and have for years.

linux gives me the flexibility i want to do with these old beasts.
they're slow sometimes, but hey, they're not
dual-proc g4 or g5 beasts .

simon cote

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Hi, Simon.

On Sep 14 2008, Simon Raven wrote:
> please cc: me at simon.raven.DeleteThis@gmail.com

Done.

> here's a report of successful usage of debian on a couple ppc machines
> i own/maintain.

Thanks for the report. I have already included it in the Lenny
recertification page. You can edit the files if you think that you can
add more information.

> i have 2 in current use, both oldworld. one's a mac clone, power tower
> pro. up until several months ago, i was booting it via quik. this
> works ok, but it has issues with its pci bus, making video on it iffy,
> luckily it's only a server; to get around it, i boot with bootx from a
> small mac os 9 partition, with the bootx extension in the extensions
> 'folder' on the mac partition. otherwise, this machine works fine.

Well, nice that you can get new software runnning on your box. The only
thing that is less than desirable is that need for MacOS 9.

> the other is a beige g3, tower model. today, i was trying out grub2. i
> had a pleasant surprise when i tried to boot with grub: quik suddenly
> worked.

What a strange thing! Right after we discussed this issue, I went to the
grub2 site to see if it supported OldWorld machines. Unfortunately, it
seems that the answer is no. It would be such a nice thing to have
one bootloader for as many arches/flavours as possible.

> as of this current boot session this machine - which is also a
> server - it has booted via quik. i did see the usual DEFAULT CATCH
> error that's seen on these machines. i had a talk with rbrito earlier
> today, and i had mentioned to him/her

I'm a man.

http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito/me/no-laboratorio.jpg

> that quik didn't work on this machine. turns out it's working
> better. i suppose that's due to a wrong boot-device argument in the
> machine's OF nvram.

Sure. You can use one of the nv* tools to see your current configuration
(and possibly, copy it to a safe place, if the need to restore the
configuration arises again).

> both of these currently run debian very well, with varied hardware
> attached, and have for years.

Nice.

> linux gives me the flexibility i want to do with these old beasts.
> they're slow sometimes, but hey, they're not dual-proc g4 or g5 beasts
> .

That's one of the benefits of using Free Software.


Regards, Rogério Brito.

--
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{mackenzie,ime.usp}.br : GPG key 1024D/7C2CAEB8
http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito : http://meusite.mackenzie.com.br/rbrito
Projects: algorithms.berlios.de : lame.sf.net : vrms.alioth.debian.org


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