Martin Winpress helps keep PowerPC going with Ubuntu-MATE

A great thank you needs to go out Martin Winpress.  First he is part of the team that has given PowerPC users another great Desktop Enviroment to choose from with MATE. Second he has produced a solid distro that has PowerPC support in Ubuntu-MATE.

15.04 was a horrible release for PowerPC under Ubuntu. The release came with a version of xorg that was broken under PowerPC. Many users in the Ubuntufoums were really worried about weather or not it would be fixed. Then the same bug hit Sid right after Jessie was released. Thankfully it was fixed in Debian and the fix made it in time for the 15.10 release of Ubuntu-MATE.

Another fix that made it to Ubuntu was the javascriptcore-gtk bug that crashed browsers like midori and luakit. Now you can browse the web with these lightweight browsers under Ubuntu.

The install for users with the radeon r300 driver is the same as I documented here. Sound, wireless, video playback all worked. One issue I saw and this is because I was testing on my iBook G4 is when you play video with mpv the fans kick off after a minute. This does not happen on my PowerBook G4, but it has a slightly better video card and CPU.

There was an issue with powerd crashing when I plugged in my iPhone, but it looks like that issue has been resolved.

One of really great features that come with this version of Ubuntu-MATE is an app developed by Martin called MATE Welcome. This tool gives you access to documentation, access to the community pages, and allows you to install apps.  You can find more info here.

Another tool is MATE Tweak. It allows to change your window manager without having to logout and back in. It also allows to change your DE layout to with a selection of options. If you like a traditional Windows feel then select the Redmond layout or for OS X choose Cupertino.

With 15.10 there is better iOS support. In 14.04 and even in Debian Jessie if you are running iOS 8 or later shotwell fails to import your videos and photos from your iPhone. This issue is now resolved in 15.10. I am running iOS 9 and can import my photos into shotwell on my iBook G4.

In conclusion I am really excited about Ubuntu-MATE and the option it gives PowerPC users for a modern, secure operating system. If 16.04 is a continuation of I am seeing then the next LTS version of Ubuntu-MATE will be a distro to recommend.

Screenshot with the Cupertino layout:

Running VMs on G4 machines with LXC

It is really fun testing out different distributions. You get to see their differences and their strength/weaknesses. The one drawback is the need to keep installing ISO over and over again. I have seen people with G5 machine run qemu to host VM guests. However on G4 machine I do not think there are enough resources to really to this with taking some type of perfomance hit. Then I came across using Linux Containers (lxc) and it was exactly what I needed! So what lxc offers is virtualazation at OS level rather than on the hardware level via hypervizors. QEMU, Zen, KVM,and VB all viritalize the hardware, meaning each VM has its own dedicated hardware. Now if you have more than one core and few Gigs of RAM than this is no issue. However G4 machines at the max have 2G of ram and most are single CPU. This greatly limits what can be accomplished using hypervizors. Since lxc virtualizes on the OS level you guests will share your resources. On my iBook G4 with a single 1.42 GHz cpu and 1.5G of RAM running an instance of Debian as an lxc container performed really well. Below I will walk you through the install and set of lxc on PowerPC.

Install and Initial Setup

The following packages were the ones I used to get lxc working.

sudo apt-get install lxc bridge-utils libvirt-bin debootstrap

These will get you lxc working and allow to connect to your home network. Once you have these package installed there are somethings you need to check. First you want to be sure your kernel has all the correct configuration for lxc. The command to use is lxc-checkconfig. This will verify your kernel configuration. The output should be same as below,

rican-linux@iBookG4-Debian9:~$ sudo lxc-checkconfig
[sudo] password for rican-linux:
Kernel configuration not found at /proc/config.gz; searching…

          kernel-configuration-found-at-/boot/config-3.16.0-4-powerpc

Namespaces —-
Namespaces: enabled
Utsname namespace: enabled
Ipc namespace: enabled
Pid namespace: enabled
User namespace: enabled
Network namespace: enablede
Multiple /dev/pts instances: enabled
—- Control groups —-
Cgroup: enabled
Cgroup clone_children flag: enabled
Cgroup device: enabled
Cgroup sched: enabled
Cgroup cpu account: enabled
Cgroup memory controller: enabled
—- Misc —-
Veth pair device: enabled
Macvlan: enabled
Vlan: enabled
File capabilities: enabled
Note : Before booting a new kernel, you can check its configuration
usage : CONFIG=/path/to/config /usr/bin/lxc-checkconfig
rican-linux@iBookG4-Debian9:~$

All the settings should show enabled. LXC comes with predefined templates that you can use to install containers. These templates can be found in the /usr/share/lxc/templates directory. Since this is on a PowerPC machine you can only install templates that support this architecture. Which leaves you with Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, and OpenSUSE. Right now I have been able to successfuly create containers for Debain and Ubuntu. There are some issue with the other two that I am looking into. Now to create a container the command to run is lxc-create. So to create a Debian container this is they syntax to use,

sudo lxc-create -n container_name -t debian

One the proces is complete a root password will be given that you should change one you launch the container and login. Before that step you should set up the networking so that you container can access the internet.

Networking

The process I used to manage my network connections is libvirt. It basically creates a vitual bridge so your VMs in the LXC containers can access the network. If you have libvirt already installed then to see if you bridge is ready run this command sudo virsh net-info default. The output should be as below,

rican-linux@iBookG4-Debian9:~$ sudo virsh net-info default
[sudo] password for rican-linux:
Name: default
UUID: d57736ba-96cc-4798-aefa-1a046fdb1de8
Active: yes
Persistent: yes
Autostart: no
Bridge: virbr0

If the active field is set to no then enable the bridge with this command virsh net-start default. The field should be now set to yes and you should see the interface if you run sudo ifconfig -a.

rican-linux@iBookG4-Debian9:~$ sudo ifconfig -a
….
virbr0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 52:54:00:4a:83:be
inet addr:192.168.122.1 Bcast:192.168.122.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:454898 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:897541 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:77865967 (74.2 MiB) TX bytes:1259670602 (1.1 GiB)
virbr0-nic Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 52:54:00:4a:83:be
BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:500
RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)
….

The ip address shown is controlled by this configuration file, /var/lib/libvirt/network/default.xml. This file also controls the dhcp scope of the virtual network and where you can set static reservations. You can read more on this on the Debian Wiki here.

LXC running and VNC setup

Now that lxc is install, a Debian container is created, and the networking is set,it is time to run the container and set up VNC. The command to start a container is the following,

sudo lxc-start -F -n container_name

The -F option puts you in the console on your terminal session. Once you login you want to be sure you have an ip address and can reach the internet. Once that is verified, next is to run sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade so that the latest packages are installed. Then install the DE you want to login to. The best choice that does consume too much resources is LXDE. The command to install is simply sudo apt-get install lxde for Debain or sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop for Ubuntu. Finally it is time to install the VNC server. Follow the steps below,

Install the server
sudo apt-get install vnc4server
create a non-privilaged user
adduser test
su test
as the user start and stop the server
vnc4server :1 -geometry 800x600 -depth 24
vnc4server -kill :1 -geometry 800x600 -depth 24
edit the xstartup file
nano ~/.vnc/xstartup
add at the end (Debian)
/usr/bin/lxsession -s LXDE &
add at the end (Ubuntu)
/usr/bin/lxsession -e LXDE -s Lubuntu &
restart the server
vnc4server :1 -geometry 800x600 -depth 24

The server will ask for a password when it is launch for the first time. The password will be used to login via the VNC client. On the host there are a few choices for a vnc client. There are two good command line client vncviewer and vnc4viewer. When they are installed to start the session using vncviewer by entering the following,

vncviewer ip address:1
enter password

The session should open in a window and you are done! If you want a gui client then remmina is a great choice. Below are some screenshots. If you want more info on lxc check out the Debian Wiki here

Ubuntu fustrations

There is has been a growing frustration over at the Ubuntu Forums over support for PowerPC. Lubuntu 14.04 LTS is exremely buggy. There are serious issues with firefox, and video playback software like vlc and mpv. Bug reports have been placed here and here. The latest 15.04 release is completely unusable . I installed Ubuntu-MATE 15.04 on my iBook G4 and yaboot failed to install complete making my system unbootable. 15.04 is only a standard release an not LTS, so why not say we are not releasing a PowerPC version for this release cycle till these bugs are resolved? It will at least show there is a desire to get a working PowerPC image out there. I am not trying to bash Ubuntu, I really do want to see Ubuntu produce a reliable PowerPC version. Right now Debian is the most stable PowerPC distribution of Linux. I am typing this from iBook G4 running Debian Testing (Strech).
Nevertheless, I understand the a lot of these issues could be upstream related. I know some guys with G5 machines that are having issues not only with Ubuntu but with Debian Jessie as well. This really saddens me because Jessie works great on G4 machines. The G5s are just as good as a lot modern machines today. I really do hope Ubuntu can get some these issue squared away. Ubuntu-MATE is a great distro and would I love to see a fully working PowerPC version.


UPDATE I: It looks like the firefox issue has been resolved. The most recent updates comes with firefox 38. This version fix all the firefox issue htat have previousl reported. I running Ubuntu-MATE 14.04.2 on PowerMac G4 and so far firefox is running great. I plan on posting a walkthrough on how I set up my PowerMac. Christian Zigotzky has done some great work with Linux on PowerPC. He was able with some hacking to Ubuntu-MATE 15.04 PPC working with some great Compiz action.

Compiz on Lubuntu 14.04

I reinstalled Lubuntu 14.04 on my iBook G4 to see if I can get compiz working on it. The first thing I did was install mesa packages that were patched to enable 3D acceleration on radeon r300 drivers. You can find them here. Then you will need to install the following:


rican-linux@ibookG4-lubuntu:~$ dpkg -l |grep compiz
ii  compiz                                  1:0.9.11.3+14.04.20150313-0ubuntu1    all          OpenGL window and compositing manager
ii  compiz-core                             1:0.9.11.3+14.04.20150313-0ubuntu1    powerpc      OpenGL window and compositing manager
ii  compiz-fusion-bcop                      0.8.4-1.1                             all          Compiz Fusion option code generator
ii  compiz-gnome                            1:0.9.11.3+14.04.20150313-0ubuntu1    powerpc      OpenGL window and compositing manager - GNOME window decorator
ii  compiz-plugins                          1:0.9.11.3+14.04.20150313-0ubuntu1    powerpc      OpenGL window and compositing manager - plugins
ii  compiz-plugins-default                  1:0.9.11.3+14.04.20150313-0ubuntu1    powerpc      OpenGL window and compositing manager - default plugins
ii  compiz-plugins-extra                    1:0.9.11.3+14.04.20150313-0ubuntu1    all          transitional dummy package.
ii  compiz-plugins-main                     1:0.9.11.3+14.04.20150313-0ubuntu1    all          transitional dummy package.
ii  compiz-plugins-main-default             1:0.9.11.3+14.04.20150313-0ubuntu1    all          transitional dummy package.
ii  compizconfig-settings-manager           1:0.9.11.3+14.04.20150313-0ubuntu1    all          Compiz configuration settings manager
ii  libcompizconfig0                        1:0.9.11.3+14.04.20150313-0ubuntu1    powerpc      Settings library for plugins - OpenCompositing Project
ii  python-compizconfig                     1:0.9.11.3+14.04.20150313-0ubuntu1    powerpc      Compizconfig bindings for python
rican-linux@ibookG4-lubuntu:~$

Once you have these installed open compizconfig and enable the following

1. composite
2. opengl
3. gnome compatibility
4. copy to texture
5. expose
6. desktop cube
7. rotate cube
8. animations
9. window decoration
10. application switcher
11. maxiumize
12. move window
13. resize window
14. place windows
15. ring switcher

After you have at least these settings then enter the following compiz --replace ccp &

You will also need to set these to get the cube working goto:

general options ->Desktop Size 
  Horizontal Virtual Size =4
  Vertical Vitual Size =1

Now you can hit super+s to see the expo and CTRL+ALT+L Click to rotate the cube. Most of the plugins work, wobbly windows, fire paint, and show mouse options work as well. I am still working change the default theme (If anyone has suggestions please share!)

Luigi does it again and new OS on my iBook

Luigi Burdo has done a great service in showing how the PowerPC platform is not dead but can still be used in 2015. The video he shared with the Mac Mini running Ubuntu MATE was fantastic. I called it at the time the best Linux on PowerPC video on the web. Well Luigi just raised the bar again with this latest one. In the following video he is displaying Lubuntu 14.04 on Powermac G5 Quad Core with a RadeonHD 6570 video card. Watch and enjoy!

Also I have been using my iBook G4 as a testing machine. Trying different distros and applications. Mostly I have been testing with Debian and Ubuntu, but i have been thinking about trying others as well. Luigi is reporting success with OpenSUSE 13.2 if anyone wants to try. I have decided to install Gentoo. I just got the GUI up and working and still doing more tests before I go into a full review. It is more work to get, but if you have any familiarity with Arch then it is a similar process. More on Gentoo to come!

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 to be an offical flavor soon!

Congrats to the Ubuntu MATE Team!It looks like their 15.04 release will the first as an Offical Ubuntu flavor. People who are looking for more a traditional desktop look on Linux should check out Ubuntu MATE. I posted a previous video by Luigi showing Ubuntu MATE on PowerPC. So if you have a G4 or G5 there is a PPC ISO you can grab and install.



read more here
visit The Ubuntu MATE site
PowerPC ISO here





UPDATE: Ubuntu MATE will officially support PowerPC in 15.04! See their blog.

The Best Linux on PowerPC video on the Web!

Luigi Burdo, a frequent poster on the Ubuntu Forums, posted an awesome video of his G4 MacMini running Ubuntu MATE PPC. I usually visit youtube to see Linux on PPC videos. The ones I have seen have really been not that great. Mostly it is just complaints on things not working. No one really posted a video sharing what Linux could be if one placed the work in. Well Luigi did and it has inspired me to post one of my own soon. So please check it out!

Debian Wheezy On My PowerBook G4

In 2007, I bought my first Mac from a friend.  It was a PowerBook G4 running OS X 10.5 (Leopard).  Since then I have always used Macs. When Apple changed from the PowerPC architecture to Intel I still kept my powerbook handy.  Then in 2009 I purchased my MacBook Pro.  I still use this MacBook today. This is what always impressed me with Apple, they just produce reliable hardware.  I kept my PowerBook handy, but as time passed and Apple stopped supporting Leopard I just put it away.  I tried in the past to put Linux on it, but was unsuccessful.  Recently, I tried again to revive my old PowerPC machine.  This time with some patience and research I have been able to get a modern operating system on my old PowerBook. Running Linux on PowerPC takes time and patience.  However, if you love tinkering and are willing to make the effort then Linux can bring life to your old machine.  Below are some screenshots of my machine.

LXDE Desktop:

Openbox:

Here are some sites to reference that greatly helped me get Linux working on PowerPC:

Dan DeVoto's blog has a great series on installing and configuring Debian.  Plus, for those who still run Tiger or Leopard he has great suggestions for video playback and securing your Mac.

Zen's powerpcliberation is another source of information for Linux and OS X on PowerPC. Dan is a guest writer for that blog as well.

The Ubuntu wiki and Debian wiki have helpful sections on PowerPC  here and here