Video Playback on PowerPC Linux

In my testing of Lubuntu and Ubuntu-MATE on my iBook G4 one things that I notice often is that when playing back video using mpv my overall CPU usage spike to the high 90s. The fan on my machine start spinning really loud and fast. I thought I would do a comparison of with Debian to see how they compare. Here are some of my findings.

Machine

iBook G4
1.42 GHz CPU
1.5 GB RAM

These findings are based on lxtask

LXDE and Openbox

Overal CPU average 50%-60%
MPV process 30%-40%
RAM 140MB

The fans not once came one and there only brief spikes to 80%-90% CPU usage.

XFCE

Overal CPU average 70%-80%
MPV process 30%-40%
RAM 240MB

Even with the higher numbers due to XFCE being a heavier desktop than LXDE, video playback did not cause my fans to run. As much as I love Ubuntu based distros Debian is by far the better performer. I believe a lot of it is due how I set up Debian. When I installed the system I manually chose what applications and services were installed on my machine. Ubuntu on the other hand chooses for you what comes with the desktop. The advantage to this is you get a compete working system pretty easily. The cost of this is have a performance hit. On newer machines this may not be a big deal but on older G3 and G4 PPC machines it is a great deal. You get no more than 2GB of RAM on some machines, and a single processor for the iBooks and PowerBooks. I would never say stop using Lubuntu or Ubuntu-MATE, however give Debian a try. Yes it will take some more work than Ubuntu, however the benefits of running it are great.

Ubuntu-MATE fits my MacBook Pro nicely

I have been an OS X users for years. I was always happy how it performed. Then came Yosemite and all changed. It was just one issue after another. Safari performance was poor, my garmin would no longer work. Then came the news that iPhoto was being replaced with Photos. This new change meant that syncing photos from the iPhone to the MacBook will now require sending your picture to iCloud. No longer was there direct sync from phone to machine.

It was then I decided to move to Linux on my MacBook. Now I have been using Linux on my PowerPC machines, but kept my MacBook running OS X. So now came the decision of what distro to use.

I first started Ubuntu 15.04, but I was not happy with Unity. There was issues that made some web pages barely readable, software center was having css issues and suspend was not working well on Apple hardware. Then I went to Ubuntu-GNOME and still the same issues. Then finally I went with Ubuntu-MATE.

Ubuntu-MATE  works great on this machine. All the issues I had with the previous flavors of Ubuntu were gone. Plus all the features that Ubuntu-MATE team have added like one-click compiz activation and multi panel layout so if you are looking for OS X or Windows layout setting it up is pretty simple. The performance has been great so far. I could not recommend this flavor of Ubuntu more highly. Thanks to Martin Winpress and the team.

Adventures in MATE, Lubuntu, and Debian Jessie

It has been a few weeks since I have posted anything and they have been busy ones! I have been putting the iBook to the test loading Lubuntu 14.04 and 15.04, Ubuntu-MATE 14.04 and 15.04, also Debian Jessie. So here is a quick run down of my thoughts on these distros.

14.04 Lubuntu and Ubuntu-MATE

The install of these distros was as expected. No real hiccups to report. I did notice that some web pages did not load correctly in firefox but they would fine on Iceweasel in Debian. There were not many but it was annoying. Also without some compositing (ie using compton) video playback was choppy. Now one thing that di1 d excite me was in the Ubuntu-MATE release notes there are patched .deb files for mesa and .deb files for Compiz. So obviously I installed them to see if I can get some sweet 3D compositing! Well it was a little buggy but I did get the cube up! (see screenshot below).

15.04 Lubuntu and Ubuntu-MATE

Beta1 of Ubuntu-MATE ran really well. I have posted a really nice screenshot of my desktop with Numix based themes and icons. However Beta2 was a total bust! When I upgraded MATE it crashed my system completely. Lubuntu would not even load the live iso and MATE would crash when I try. There is active bug report on Launch Pad detailing it. If you are similar issues please post them there.

Debian Jessie

I am huge fan of Debian. My PowerBook G4 is running stable due to its reliability. I first ran Jessie months ago and was caught by surprise with some of the issues I ran across. Now coming back to it with a lot more experience with Linux on PowerPC it was a much smoother experience. There have been some great improvements since the last time I ran Jessie. Getting KMS going is not the pain it once was due mostly to know what parameters to set on boot (see my previous post here). Video playback was great and overall there is not much negative to say. There two areas that got annoyed me. First was the sound. You need to enable the snd-aoa-i2sbus module to enable alsamixer, however even after I got that working there was no sound. I need to install the pauvcontrol package to finally enable sound. Second there has been a long standing javascript bug that broke GTK web browsers in Ubuntu and Debian Jessie. Finally there is a patch that fixed this issue! Hopefully will be making it to both the Debain and Ubuntu repos soon. Also it looks like Jessie is set for official release on April 25. I will be looking forward to it!

Ubuntu-MATE on my iBook G4!

So I have been wanting another PowerPC machine to some more testing of different linux distros on. My current PowerBook G4 has been my main laptop for a few months and I am pretty happy with Debian on it right now. So I have been searching craigslist and ebay for any good deals on iBooks. I was able to get an iBook G4 1.42 GHz for about $96 on criagslist. I was excited to bring it home to begin the job of getting Linux to run on it. It had  768MB of RAM so I ordered a 1GB stick from OWC, it should be arriving this week. So here are my thoughts on 15.04 MATE

1. Install

    The install was very straight forward. However to boot into the live iso you will need to this at yaboot (see graphics section below for detail):

live radeon.modeset=1 video=radeonfb:off video=offb:off video=1024x768-32[enter your screen resolution] radeon.agpmode=-1 

The CD Rom has some issues so I decided to go with a USB install. On iBook G4 macines this means booting into openfirmware and running a command like this: boot usb1/@1:2,\\yaboot. There is great information on USB booting on the UbuntuPowerPC wiki if you want more detail. Once you get the installer going it is pretty standard and simple.

2. Wireless

    The Ubuntu Community Documentation Site has a really good walkthtough on installing firmware on Broadcom wireless cards here. Once I identified my chipset I was able to download the proper driver: sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer. 

3. Sound

    Begining with 14.04 there are known issues with sound on PowerPC Macs. There are some ibooks and powerbooks requires modules to be recompiled. There is an extensive discussion thread on the Ubuntu Forums here. Thankfully this was not the case with either my iBook G4 or my PowerBook G4. I just need to delete the file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.local.conf then I need to load the correct module by running this command: sudo modprobe snd-aoa-i2sbus. I then ran the command alsamixer and set the PCM channel to 80. Once that was set I added the snd-aoa-i2sbus module to the /etc/modules so it would load on boot. There is more information on sound issues at the UbuntuPowerPC wiki. This issue is also exprienced on Debian testing (Jessie).

4. Graphics

    Since 14.10 you need to enable KMS if you have a radeon video card (see this bug thread). KMS has been known to be buggy so in the past you had the option to disable it. Now without it you will have issue like no XVid playback. I entered the following on my iBook to enable KMS on the second yaboot screen on boot: 

Linux radeon.modeset=1 video=radeonfb:off video=offb:off video=1024x768-32 radeon.agpmode=-1 

When you login you will need to these paramters to the /etc/yaboot.conf file. You add them this way:

image=/boot/vmlinux
        label=Linux
        read-only
        initrd=/boot/initrd.img
        append="quiet splash radeon.modeset=1 video=radeonfb:off video=offb:off video=1024x768-32 radeon.agpmode=-1"

image=/boot/vmlinux.old
        label=old
        read-only
        initrd=/boot/initrd.img.old
        append="quiet splash radeon.modeset=1 video=radeonfb:off video=offb:off video=1024x768-32 radeon.agpmode=-1"

One you add these setting using nano, vi or whatever editor you use. You wil to run the following command sudo ybin -v to apply the changes. You should see the following or something similar if KMS is enabled.

:~$ cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log |grep -e drm -e dri2 -e radeon -e KMS
[    31.499] Kernel command line: root=UUID=cbe24412-5af3-4fd4-8a99-179d70cf2b66 ro quiet splash video=radeonfb:off radeon.modeset=1 video=radeonfb:off video=offb:off video=1024x768-32 radeon.agpmode=-1
[    31.522] (II) xfree86: Adding drm device (/dev/dri/card0)
[    31.806] (II) LoadModule: "radeon"
[    31.806] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/radeon_drv.so
[    31.901] (II) Module radeon: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
[    32.124] (II) [KMS] Kernel modesetting enabled.
[    32.127] (II) Loading sub module "dri2"
[    32.127] (II) LoadModule: "dri2"
[    32.127] (II) Module "dri2" already built-in
[    32.144] (II) RADEON(0): KMS Color Tiling: enabled
[    32.145] (II) RADEON(0): KMS Color Tiling 2D: disabled
[    32.145] (II) RADEON(0): KMS Pageflipping: enabled
[    33.081] (II) config/udev: Adding drm device (/dev/dri/card0) card0 /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:10.0/drm/card0
[    33.081] (II) config/udev: Ignoring already known drm device (/dev/dri/card0)

Having KMS enabled does not mean that you will have 3D acceleration. There are issues with the Mesa r300 driver that will require you to set the default screen depth on you xorg.conf file to 16. However this will limit your display. There are patched deb files for Mesa that fix this issue. However they are only for 14.04 version of Mesa. If you want them you can download them here. There is also more information on configuring graphics on the UbuntuPowerPC wiki as well.

5. Performance

   The desktop, while not as fast as my PowerBook running LXDE on Debian, performed well. Moving the mouse around was a little sluggish at times, but I am thinking that could be either the trackpad or maybe I needed more RAM. Video playback using mpv was as great. I was able to get some decent 720p playback on some videos. Since I was running 15.04 version I was not able to really use the patch for r300 mesa driver needed for 3D acceleration. This means that some of the games I wanted to play like Supertuxkart was just not possible. Web browser was good with the exception that firefox could load certain pages that would load fine on Debian using iceweasel. I am seeing the same issue with Lubuntu 14.04 so I do think it is an issue Ubuntu-MATE specifically. So if you have an iBook, PowerBook, and especially a Powermac G4 or G5 give Ubuntu-MATE a try!