Living the Gentoo life!

It was a while back when I did my Gentoo review on my iBook G4. I was really liked how well it performed but the one drawback was the compile time. Well I have decided to run with Gentoo again. This time I am using my PowerBook G4 (it is back from the dead!!) and my PowerMac G5. It has been a few weeks and it has been both challenging and fun. Pretty much everything I did in my previous review was the same but I would like to take some time and go over some specifics.

Kernel Compiling

When it comes time to compile your kernel, there are two commands that will give you what you need to have a bootable kernel. Then you can go in and make your tweaks.

G3 and G4 machines use: make pmac32_defconfig
G5 machines use: make g5_defconfig


Now that you have your base kernel you can use make menuconfig to make your needed edits. Be sure to follow the Gentoo PPC FAQ for the graphics and sound sections. If you follow that then you should be ok with the kernel. If I would have started using defconfigs from the begging I would have saved hours of work!

Yaboot

The latest version of yaboot is broken and if you try to use to install the boot loader you will not be able to boot. Thankfully the version of yaboot on the live cd works fine and here is how you use it.

First you need to have your fstab file set up. The PPC:Handbook's filesystem section covers this well. At this point of the install you are still chroot in you new enviroment, now you are going to leave by entering exit. Once you are out to set up yaboot use this command: yabootconfig --chroot /mnt/gentoo. Just answer the questions provided and you should have a working yaboot.conf file. Finally since this will be the inital load you will enter this: mkofboot -v -C /mnt/gentoo/etc/yaboot.conf. Now you should be ready to boot. If you do run into issues booting into your system, go back into the live CD and edit the device section of yaboot.conf and set it to hd:. Then reload with ybin -v -C /mnt/gentoo/etc/yaboot.conf. This should be the only change you need.

Final Thoughts

Living in Gentoo has been a lot of work. As time permits I will be sharing some of the challenges I ran into. Yet I must say I have really come to love living in Gentoo. I have learned so much about how Linux works as an OS just by using Gentoo and getting to work on my PowerPC machines. Yes the compile times are sometime long (I left it running overnight to build xorg and xfce). However what you get in the end is a system that you can truely say you built from the ground up. There is a level of satisfaction with that.

Lubuntu 16.04 Alpha 2 is out with LXQT awesomeness!

I have been wanting to test out LXQT for ages. So far it is not in the Debian repos for PowerPC. Thanks to the developers over at Lubuntu that time is now!

So with the release for 16.04 Alpha 2 you too can have LXQT running on your PowerPC iBook or PowerBook. You can find the instructions here and a special thanks to Walter Lapchynski of the Lubuntu Team for using my screenshot. I will post some more below.

I really like the design of the DE plus Lubuntu has added more options to customize it as well. For example they added the LXQT Configuration Center. From there you can do things like edit your keyboard shortcuts. This is a nice change from editing files in vi. Also using compton just adds that nice compositing effect that make DE look even better.

It is still buggy is some areas. The window to manage the panel does not always pop open, two finger scrolling with the trackpad does not work on the windows or Qupzilla. Video playback works but it still more resource heavy than Debian. However some of these should not be an issue if you running a Powermac.

Please give Lubuntu a test drive and go to the QA ISO Tracker, from there run some of their tests and post your results. This is how we keep PowerPC supported under Linux.

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.

Testing Lubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus

Now that Wiley has been released, development for Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) has begun. Daily images have already been posted. Both Lubuntu and Ubuntu-MATE have PowerPC images ready for testing. People over at the UbuntuForums have alreasdy begun testing the new images. Also there was hope that the radeon r300 bug was fixed if you looked at the Mesa 11.0.3 release notes. Xenial as of now comes with the Mesa 11.0.4 package. So here are my initial thoughts.

Install

The install was pretty standard. There was nothing that stood out and to be honest this is a good thing. The installer should ask you the questions the app needs to build the system according to what you have requested. I noticed in Wiley that section the manages setting the timezone was broken and you needed to set the timezone after install. This has now been fixed.

Desktop

The desktop had a realy nice default look to it. I made the panel dark using the Lubuntu-Dark theme. The panel apps I tried worked as well. I noticed in 14.04 that the weather panel app did not work. Now in 16.04 it is working. The system resource monitor worked as well. I like seeing the CPU and RAM usage plus the app launches lxtask when you click on it. A lot of the default apps that normall come with Lubuntu were not installed but this is something I expected since it is so early in development and there maybe changes as to what ships in the final release.

Graphics

Sadly eventhough Mesa has stated this bug to resolved it is not the case. You cannot get 3D acceleration with radeon r300 driver with a default depth of 24. Graphics rendering has been an issue for PowerPC since moving to KMS. It is not a show stopper in using Linux on PowerPC, but it is annoying.

Browsing the Web

Firefox worked as expected. I install Midori, Qupzilla, Luakit, and Surf as well. Midori works great! It looks like even downloading files is working better. In the past there were times when that feature would crash. It is really good to see improvement there. Also uploading files is working as well. Luakit has gotten a little buggy. There were times when the browser crashed when I used it. It is something I have seen in 15.10 and I know there is an open bug report on it. Qupzilla has issues when trying to scroll down using the touch pad. Other than that it ran pretty well. Running Surf showed no issues that i could see.

My first impression of Lubuntu 16.04 are pretty optimistic. I will be checking in on it when the Alpha and Beta releases come to see how the distro is doing under PowerPC.

Linux from Scratch Journey part 1

I have installed both Gentoo and Arch Linux in VMs and real hardware. Both are the most customizable Linux distros I have worked on. You basically get a bash shell and build from there. However if you really want a customizable version of Linux that you can say you built then you should take the plunge and try Linux from Scratch.

Linux from Scratch (LFS) is a version of Linux that is built completely from source. What you get from LFS is a document that walks you through how to build your system. I just finish the section where you build your temporary tool-chain that you will use the build the system. The instructions were great. So long as you follow them exactly you should be fine. I am right now building an x86_64 based system, however depending on how successful I am I may try to build a PowerPC version on my iBook G4.

I will be adding posts as I work through LFS. Document both the success and issues that may arise.

First dive into BSD land

So I have spent the last few months working through FreeBSD and OpenBSD on my iBook G4 to see how well PowerPC is supported. It has been a mixture of challenge and frustration. I was hoping to make way more progress than I did, but in the future I hope to press on and report better news.

FreeBSD on PowerPC

The one thing that I really like about the BSDs is their initial installs are extremely simple and straightforward. Just like Gentoo, FreeBSD has a handbook that guide you though the set up. The documentation there is fantastic. FreeBSD uses a ports system for installing packages. This means compiling from source everything that is not in the base system. They do have precompiled binaries to install but they are not available for PowerPC. This is where things got really frustrating.

If you want to install Xorg on iBook G4 with a 1.42 Ghz CPU be prepared to wait for at least 2 days to compile. YES TWO DAYS! This is mostly because the process halts when it needs into install a dependency and it will ask if you want the default settings for do you want to change them. Then it will start to compile and install the dependency before it actually install the package you want. If a package has multiple dependencies then you can see why it takes so long.

There were ports that simply crashed and would not build. Packages like drm for graphics and even firefox would either fail to build or require some work to get going. I eventually got XFCE going but I needed to disable hardware acceleration and I had no browser to access the web. I never got chance to work on wireless access. Maybe sometime in the future.

So for a headless server FreeBSD could be used on PowerPC but there is a lot of work that needs to be done before I could recommend as a DE.

OpenBSD on PowerPC

OpenBSD uses a FAQ as their means of documentation. Like the FreeBSD handbook it is a great source of information. The install like FreeBSD was fairly simple. The one area I would recommend you deviate from the defaults is the disk partitioning section. The installer will recommend a partition scheme for you. This scheme creates multiple small partitions for /boot, /home, /usr, etc. The issue is that the chances for a partition (especially /usr since that is where the ports tree ends up) to get full pretty quickly. So I recommend doing a custom layout and have a swap and root partition only. You can find more info on to set up disks in OpenBSD here.

One advantage that OpenBSD has over FreeBSD is their precompiled packages are available for PowerPC. OpenBSD actually prefers you to install their packages over compiling ports. This is from their section in the FAQ on packages and ports,

IMPORTANT NOTE: The ports tree is meant for advanced users. Everyone is encouraged to use the pre-compiled binary packages.

OpenBSD also has Xorg as part of its base system which is a huge help in setting up the DE. I was able to get lumina and xfce working but there was some performance issues that need to be worked on. It looks the radeon r300 driver is supported under 5.8 (current), which is set to release soon.

Apart from a DE, OpenBSD is superb platform for networking. Setting up OpenBSD as a simple router/firewall is pretty straight forward. OpenBSD's pf is an amazing packet filter. There are also plenty of great packages that will help turn OpenBSD into a pretty powerful application layer firewall. I have been really enjoying learning this aspect of OpenBSD even if it is not strictly PowerPC related.

I have yet to try out NetBSD and it is on my list. I will post more on BSD as time permits.

turning off ipv6 under Linux

Anyone familiar with networking know that the available number public ipv4 addresses is pretty much dried up. So as time goes on the move to ipv6 will only grow. However at least in parts of the US home users may not want to switch just yet. My local provider has ipv6 enabled but the performance is horrible. Pages and downloads simply drag or just stalls. Since the OS will prefer ipv6 over ipv4 when available the only option is to disable it. First check to see if you are receiving an ipv6 address by pulling the interface info from terminal

rican-linux@xubuntu-MacBookPro:~$ ifconfig wlp3s0
wlp3s0       Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr
                   inet addr:10.10.1.20 Bcast:10.10.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
                   inet6 addr: fe80::225:ff:fe4f:4961/64 Scope:Link
                   inet6 addr: 2602:306:8b30:a310:225:ff:fe4f:4961/64 Scope:Global
                   inet6 addr: 2602:306:8b30:a310::43/128 Scope:Global
                   UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
                   RX packets:41182 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:624154
                   TX packets:21081 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
                   collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
                   RX bytes:36444300 (36.4 MB) TX bytes:2165921 (2.1 MB)
                   Interrupt:21


Now to disable ipv6 globally you will need to add this statement to the end of the /etc/sysctl.conf file, net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1. Then run the command as root sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.conf. This will disable ipv6 on your system.

Hopefully in time as more places have better ipv6 support this option will not be needed.