A long time ago, in a decade far, far away, I dabbled with Linux on PowerPC hardware, specifically the PowerPC Macintoshes. After lots of trial and error, I was able to get Yellow Dog Linux and Mandrake running on a Power Mac 8600 and then on a beige Power Mac G3 at my old job. I also managed to get Debian installed on a Motorola StarMax 4000 MT which I still have in storage (if you’re not familiar with this model, it was a Power Macintosh clone from back in the mid-1990s). I even got Ubuntu running on my iMac G5 and boy did that distro run circles around OS X Leopard back in the day! That was the last Macintosh I would ever own before committing to Linux on the PC.
However, a few months ago, I acquired two Power Macintoshes from someone I know. One is a Power Macintosh G4 “Sawtooth” which, unfortunately, won’t turn on (probably a bad power supply or a bad PRAM battery….or both). The other is a Power Macintosh G5. This particular G5 model is designated “Powermac7,3” which means it’s a dual 1.8 GHz G5 model with a NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra AGP Pro card and PCI slots. It came to me with Leopard installed on the hard drive. Of course, a Linux geek like myself wouldn’t stand for this. Thus, I replaced the hard drive and attempted to revisit my Linux/ppc days of yore.
Upon searching for a suitable Linux distribution, I quickly learned that support for the PowerPC was not as easy to come by in 2018. Most distributions stopped supporting PowerPC (ppc) and even PowerPC64 (ppc64) with the exception of little-endian PowerPC chips from IBM (ppc64el). While I did manage to find a Fedora ISO, it wouldn’t boot no matter what I tried. I eventually decided to go with tried-and-true Debian and, after a lot of searching, I came across the Debian Ports page which keeps unofficial ports of discontinued platforms. I downloaded the ISO for “sid” which is based on upcoming “buster” (v10) and burned it to a CD.
BTW, I also tried PowerPC 10.04 LTS and everything worked-everything. However, upgrading from PowerPC 10.04 to 12.10 was a train wreck. As I said, I've got both working-OS X 10.5.8 and PowerPC 12.04.01-although I'm still trying to track down the resolution of the wireless / Broadcom / B43 networking issue. Linux on PowerPC Macs has 2,055 members. This is an English-language user-to-user support group. Linux and BSD Unix are free, open source operating systems that have long been available on Apple Macintosh hardware but not nearly as widely deployed as the Mac OS. Void Linux for PowerPC/Power ISA (unofficial) Void Linux ppc is a staging fork of the Void Linux distribution intended for the PowerPC/Power architecture. It supports 64-bit and 32-bit hardware, with 64-bit supporting both little and big endian modes, while aiming to. Can Linux be installed on a PowerMac G5? Find out in today's video! Support this channel simply by shopping on Am.
Hello, yaboot! It’s been a while…
Booting up from that CD on the Power Mac G5 and seeing the Yaboot prompt (Yaboot is a Linux boot loader for “NewWorld” Power Macs) brought back all those memories from my early Linux/ppc days! I went through the netinstall and, after a few failed attempts to boot and then creating an ext2 /boot partition after realizing that Yaboot doesn’t support ext4, I was finally able to boot the installed system….until the screen went blank.
Setting some kernel parameters to prevent this from happening allowed me to get the login prompt after it booted up, and I quickly began installing packages. I got tmux (a terminal multiplexer, shown above) installed as well as many other packages like Window Maker, Fluxbox, and even the MATE desktop environment which was my ultimate goal. After configuring my .xinitrc to load Xorg with a window manager / desktop environment, I ran startx and….it failed. Doing some investigation online led me to news that the NVIDIA card and nouveau on PowerPC were to blame, and that getting it to work might require recompiling the kernel to use 4K page addressing instead of the default 64K. My heart sunk.
Power Mac G5 Os
Nevertheless, I wasn’t going to quit so easily. After trying various changes to the kernel parameters and configuring device settings in Xorg.conf, my brain finally had an idea that was simple (and crazy) enough to actually work. See, I had my monitor connected to the G5 using a VGA-to-DVI adapter. After all of my failed attempts to get Xorg working, I decided to change out the VGA cable and adapter and use a dedicated DVI cable. I also changed the kernel parameters to use “nvidiafb”. After doing this, I rebooted the G5 and pessimistically ran “startx”. A gasp of joy came out of my mouth as I saw Window Maker start in all of its NeXTSTEP-ish glory! You can imagine the happy dance I did right after!
Achieved the “NeXT” step! ?
I then configured .xinitrc to load MATE and, after managing to disable window compositing which would cause it to lock up the system, I was inside the MATE desktop and life was….OK.
SONAR Mac Prototype. A collaboration between Cakewalk and CodeWeavers. Several months ago, we promised to deliver a SONAR Mac Alpha. To build it, we collaborated with a company called CodeWeavers. CodeWeavers has a technology called CrossOver that is basically a Windows-to-Mac translator, allowing native Windows applications to run on a Mac. Sonar x3 for mac.
I say OK because I have come across some hiccups (as if you haven’t already noticed with all that I’ve mentioned so far). Pianobar and VLC crash with an “Illegal Instruction” message. Firefox ESR won’t last a minute before crashing, and the latest kernel upgrade from 4.16.5 to 4.17.6 caused the fans to run at full blast (something that I remember from my old iMac G5). Thankfully, after some more searching and comparing the modules loaded with the old kernel and the new kernel, I narrowed it down to the “windfarm” modules not loading on boot with the newer 4.17.6 kernel image. Running “modprobe windfarm_core” from the terminal tamed the fans once again. Not as straightforward as it was back in my early Linux/ppc days, but the Debian Ports maintainers for PowerPC do stress that we are running “sid”, aka “unstable”, and it is going to beunstable, so this behavior should be expected. I’ve tried to send a bug report to inform them of this, but ReportBug freezes the desktop when it tried to report the bug (adding insult to injury), so, for now, I’ve added the windfarm modules myself to /etc/modules as a workaround until they fix it.
Mac G5 Os
Even with all of these quirks, it was nice to get Linux running on PowerPC hardware again. And, if you do come across some old Power Macintosh hardware (preferably a G4 or G5) and some time to spare, you can give it a try for yourself. You’ll find all the information you need on the Debian Ports page and the latest ISO can be found here (select ppc64 for 64-bit Debian to run on G5 Macs or select powerpc for 32-bit Debian to run on any Power Mac including the G5).
Brew install ntfs-3g. If you are on OSX 10.11 (El Capitan), temporary disable System Integrity Protection. Steps to disable the Integrity protection. There are four steps to disable: 1 - Reboot the Mac and hold down Command + R keys simultaneously after you hear the startup chime, this will boot OS X into Recovery Mode. Ntfs for mac el capitan free download - Apple Mac OS X El Capitan, Paragon NTFS for Mac, M3 NTFS for Mac, and many more programs.
Linux For Ppc Mac G5 Pro
Once I have all (or at least most) of the kinks worked out, I hope to use this for some music production so I don’t have to rely so much on my Fedora laptop. I’ve got Qtractor, QjackCtl, and some DSSI soft synths installed and my Yamaha S08 synth is supported via USB for MIDI input, so I’m ready to rock and roll!
Now, if only I could reduce those xruns some more…