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Gentoo LiveCD for PowerPC G5 84

Posted by timothy from the industrial-strength dept.
tantive writes with this announcement from the Gentoo home page. "Gentoo for PowerPC G5 now available. We're proud to announce the availability of the Gentoo for PowerPC G5 32-bit LiveCD. ISOs are now available on our main OSU mirror. The LiveCD has been tested on a dual 2GHz G5 SMP PowerPC machine with 2.5GB RAM, a 1.6GHz machine, as well as others. It includes pre-released yaboot-1.3.11 bootloader and a 2.6.0-test9 benh kernel. It runs at 100% speed, with fans currently also at 100% (kernel developers are working on slowing down the fans when not needed)." Read more below.

The announcement continues "Installation is possible on the SATA drives. We are now hard at work to create optimized stages, and the store will carry G5 LiveCDs when stage building is finished. Right now you can bootstrap your own G5-optimized system, or use a generic ppc stage3 install with GRP to install Gentoo in 20 minutes. We would like to thank benh (PPC kernel developer) for his excellent work in supporting the G5, as well as all users who tested the ISO, and particularly IBM System Software researcher Eric Van Hensbergen, who provided fantastic test/debug help during the LiveCD development process."
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Gentoo LiveCD for PowerPC G5 More

Gentoo LiveCD for PowerPC G5

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  • I was at a demo of a G5 recently - it was amazingly quiet considering there are 16 fans in there however while the guy was talking, suddenly all the fans started getting louder - the thing sounded like it was getting ready to take off. Turns out that it had crashed (CPU at 100% probably causing the fans to kick in to protect it).

    I now know why the things are not fitted on castors.

    • Re:Ahh fan speed (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Who modded this up? Only 9 fans in my G5.

      The smells like a troll. Nothing like a personal anecdote to support one's opinion.
    • I've got a dual 2GHz (in my office), and I found that removing the clear plastic shroud caused the expected increase in fan speed to compensate. Unfortunately, putting the shroud back causes the machine to crash. It looks like a bug in the firmware.
      You don't notice it immediately, unless you try and use the hung machine of course. Slowly, the fans speed up because the hardware isn't hearing from the monitoring daemon. It does, in fact, sound like a jet reving up and it gets pretty damn loud.

      So far, thi
      • It says pretty clearly in the documentation NOT to run the G5 with the fan shroud off. Also, removing the shroud while the machine is operating is not advised. It will (should) shut down the machine.
        • it shouldn't shut down. Apple initially was going to put the machine to sleep when it was opened, but as of release, the expected behavior is to simply spin the fans up.

          I doubt it was caused by static. It happened twice to me and the desk in on an anti-static mat. It'd have to be pretty darn sensitive to react to the amount of static I could have delivered.
  • Will the G5 livecd work on G4s?

    Just wondering if there are going to be G5 distro's only now, or will they be backward compatible.

    • Re:Will the G5 livecd work on G4s? (Score:5, Informative)

      by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Tuesday November 11, 2003 @07:30PM (#7449101) Homepage
      Nope. G5 CDs won't work on G4s or G3, but G4 CDs will work on G4s and G5 but not G3s and last but not least G3 CDs will work on G3s, G4s and G5s.

      OK, if you didn't survive that, let's put it this way. The CDs work "UP" the processor list, but not "DOWN" (unless there is some specific bug that would prevent the G3 CD from working with the G5s, for example).

      So will there be specific G5 distros? Not any more than there are specific Pentium IV distros or Athlon distros.

      • There is more of an impotus to optimise for G5 though, to exploit its 64-bit-ness. People quite happily run Pentium-optimised Linuxes and indeed Windows programs on their Pentium 4 systems, never exploiting the extra instructions available on these platforms.
        If the G5 were just a faster version of the G4 with one or two extra instructions, I expect the same would be true. But since it isn't, people will be much more interested in distributions that are (a) compiled from scratch or (b) available in binary G5
        • That's true, but with Gentoo it doesn't matter that much if you install with a G3 CD. Since everything get rebuilt for your computer from the ground up (or downloaded that's prebuilt for your PC) you'll get those optimisations.

          But if you're using the LiveCD as a DEMO CD for Linux, then you're right. But for installing, it's not too big a deal.

          PS: Go Gentoo!

          • Yeah, I like Gentoo too, and I use it on my two main PCs (fully optimised for their architectures, I might add!). It is true that over time the base system will gradually be recompiled even if you install from stage 3. GCC and the baselayout will get updated every so often, so when you sync and update, voila, you have a faster system.
      • No. The reason why this is a big deal is because the Power Mac G5 is not backwards-compatible -- it will not run old versions of Linux designed for previous PowerPCs. So until today there was no version of Linux available that works on the G5s.
  • I've been lusting after macs the last year or so and I'm really stoked with the new ibooks using G4 and have been getting my proverbial ducks in a row to purchase one from yellow dog linux people and have it dual booting... but I've somehow been too retarded to catch that Gentoo does PPC linux as well.. which is better? Which is most likely to work? what's the deal with Gentoo (YD is RedHat based... is Gentoo as well?)... I feel like such a newb when it comes to PPC linux.

    CharlesP

    • Re:Gentoo vs Yellow Dog? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by bobthemonkey13 ( 215219 ) <keegan@[ ]67.org ['xor' in gap]> on Tuesday November 11, 2003 @07:27PM (#7449079) Homepage Journal
      Don't forget about Debian, either. Debian GNU/Linux has a PowerPC version [debian.org] as well. Of course, there are pros and cons to using Debian (please, let's not have a Debian vs. Gentoo pissing match here), but more options are always good. No matter what distro you choose, be sure to check if there are any pitfalls or tricks with your specific hardware configuration, and with the dual boot.

      Now, for my opinion: I try to avoid RedHat-based distributions as much as possible, so I'd go for Debian (if I just want it to work) or Gentoo (if I'm feeling adventurous).

      • I don't want to start a pissing match between distros here, but I would like some advice. I own a powerbook G4 (which I love) running Panther (which I love), but I'd like to get linux on it. Ideally, I would rather not reformat (or initialize, as us Mac people have it) because it would be a pain to restore everything. So, since I really don't know much about linux I need some advice and/or help. Which distro should a newbie use, and what's the easiest way to get it done?

        • You have no options, at least with an internal drive. Installing Linux requires a partition that is not merely "formatted", but rather it must be Free Space, totally unallocated. (Presumably, so it can lay down it's own filesystem, ext3? I'm a newb also.) I have not found a way to make a single partition "Free Space" without repartitioning the entire drive.

          So--even if you did have a spare partition, unless it was not given a filesystem during the original partition setup, you're back to repartion and in

          • Use parted (Score:3, Informative)

            by justMichael ( 606509 )
            You can use parted which is on the Gentoo Live CD and probably others..

            From the FAQ [gentoo.org]: ...Before installing Gentoo, startup with the Mac OS X Install CD. Use the Disk Utility to partition the drive in your machine into two or three partitions. Alternatively use parted from the recent LiveCD, that can handle HFS and HFS+ partitions. Furthermore it is able to shrink a partition so you don't need to delete your whole disk...

            The downside to this is that the current Live CD may not work on your box due to a frim

            • I wasn't aware of the tool "parted". However, their info page [gnu.org] says that, while it can read HFS partitions, it is not one of the format types that it can resize. Unless the tool on the CD is newer than the documentation, I think it's no-go.

              If you've successfully used this tool on an HFS partition, I would be sure interested to know.
              • The version on the live CD is a patched parted. Others have used it succesfully, I have not tried it, I can't until the new live CD is released, the 10.2.8 update broke the current live CD.

                Thereare a few mentions of it on the forums [gentoo.org]

                Here [gentoo.org]
                here [gentoo.org]
                and here [gentoo.org]

                I know that's not what you wanted to hear (first hand experience), but it's better than a sharp stick in the eye ;-)
        • What you could do, is rsync your home dir onto another machine (it needs atleast ssh) so you have all of your settings/files backed up. Format and partition with OS X, then rsync back your home directory. Then it only takes as long as it takes to download your home dir to get your settings and such back to where they were before. Since you do not know a lot about linux, Yellow Dog is deffently the way to go, but if you want to learn about linux (and don't mind reading some install docs and such) go with Gen
      • Well, I started with Slackware but have been using RedHat for years now since it has been the most prevalent in the work place. So I know I'd feel fairly comfortable with it... and as I'm not wanting too much adventure with my new iBook I'm looking at getting it from yellow dog with it dual boot setup pre-installed. Maybe with an eMac a bit later I'll feel adventurous and test the various distros... but for the iBook I just want it to work (mainly just want it to write my stories and to edit small family
    • In my experience on an iBook that I owned for about 6 months, Gentoo is the cream of the crop. I didn't get anywhere near a useable system with the other distros available (Yellow Dog, Mandrake, & Debian) while I was cookin just fine in Gentoo. That was of course with prior Gentoo experience.

      I must say that the sound devices in the iBook (and I understand in all macs) is TERRIBLE in Linux, the volume does very strange things like change which side of stero sound you recieve. Other than that, things wen

    • Re:Gentoo vs Yellow Dog? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Otter ( 3800 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2003 @08:22PM (#7449531) Journal
      Which is most likely to work? what's the deal with Gentoo (YD is RedHat based... is Gentoo as well?)... I feel like such a newb when it comes to PPC linux.

      Basically:

      • Yellow Dog is Red Hat based while Debian and Gentoo (and Mandrake and SuSE, if they still exist for PPC) are what they are on x86. Going with what you're familiar with is probably a good idea.
      • Yellow Dog, Gentoo and Debian have large PPC communities to provide support. The others don't.
      • Personally, I prefer Yellow Dog because its PPC-only focus means it's better about putting in the little bells and whistles for Apple hardware support. YMMV.
      • Gentoo is source based. Ie. you compile everything from source. That isn't strickly true for the install, a lot of larger packages can be got pre-compiled for specific chips, but generally everything is installed with *your* settings for *your* computer.

        It takes a while, but you have nothing installed that you don't want.

        I used it on x86 because, In MY opinion, its the best system. SuSE comes close, but gets into too much of a confused mess.

        I also found gentoo easier to install than debian. They have a
  • With consumer graphics chips having water cooling built in, and a few laptops how long until Apple puts water cooling onto the G5's? Also, does anyone how hard it is to implement such control over the fans on a G5? Is it just some jazzed up standard PC stuff or did Apple go the proprietary route? Basically, how doe the Wintel fan control relate to the Mac?
    • With consumer graphics chips having water cooling built in, and a few laptops how long until Apple puts water cooling onto the G5's?

      i don't know about you, but I am afraid of any kind of liquid near anything that is powered by electricity. electric shock is the first thing that comes to mind.
      • electric shock is the first thing that comes to mind.

        Ah yes, all of those 1.5 volts running the CPU core can really do some serious damage...

        Actually, you don't feel anything below about 50V. Conduction through the water adds more resistance, so that figure is higher. You'd need leakage into the power supply to do anything, highly unlikely as the PS is at the top of the case and the gravity vector points down.

        Now, damage to the equipment itself is another matter. Conduction isn't much of an issu
      • He didn't necessarily mean water, or any conductive liquid.

        He might have meant jet fuel, or Methel Ethyl Keytone or any other number of things far worse than water. Since you're being paranoid and all, maybe even something radioactive.
      • I think it's safe to say they would be using purified water (or some other liquid) which wouldn't conduct electricity...
      • My rig is water cooled and it has leaked twice... both times my fault. both times it went straight onto the motherboard & video card, while the computer was booted. both times, no hardware damage. Granted, I yanked the cord as soon as I saw what happened and it was acting wierd for a second and I'm not about to go and do it again, just saying.

      • Re:Cooling (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Some of the classic Cray supercomputers (Cray 2, Cray 3) used full immersion liquid cooling. The circuit boards and wiring of these machines lived in a bath of 3M Fluorinert. (Fluorinert is a nonconducting, noncorrosive liquid.) On the Cray 2, the circuit boards didn't even have solder masks - so the bare metal traces on the circuit boards were in direct contact with the liquid coolant - right along with the leads of the chips, pins on connectors, and everything else.) Also, a machine like the Cray 3 con
    • With consumer graphics chips having water cooling built in...

      Which ones? ...how long until Apple puts water cooling onto the G5's?

      Probably never, since water cooling doesn't make the heatsink(s) and fans smaller or cheaper.
      • Probably never, since water cooling doesn't make the heatsink(s) and fans smaller or cheaper.

        Are you implying that Apple tries to cut corners wherever they can, becasue if so you're sorely mistake. They won't use water cooling becasue it's more maintanence. You gotta fill it up which most mac users don't want to do. Also leaks will happen adn they are very bad.
    • Take a CLOSE look at the cooling 'towers' on the G5 - they're not just chunks of Aluminium, you know.
  • Is that coolness or what?!?!?

    (slow down, cowboy)

  • Question for Mac Linuxers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ianoo ( 711633 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2003 @07:43PM (#7449207) Journal
    There are reasons for using Linux on a PC, which is because Windows can suck at times (well, a lot of the time!).

    But what about Macintoshes? Your systems already come with a highly optimised BSD, why would anyone ever want to install Linux? Sure Aqua is proprietary, but can't you just compile && install vanilla XFree and run it on top of the Darwin/Mach/BSD core?

    What is the reason for using the Linux kernel explictly, when you already have a GNU compatible toolchain and base system available out of the box?

    I'm not trying to troll or anything, I'm seriously asking this question of Macintosh users, mainly since I have my eye (and my chequebook) on a PowerBook...
    • There are several [cygwin.com] sources [interix.com] for GNU compatible toolchains available out-of-the-box for Windows.

      So, to ask your question more broadly, why should anybody run Linux?

      (this is meant as sarcasm, folks....)
      • I see your point. But consider, the following are the usual reasons that people choose Linux on their PC:

        - Open Source. Darwin is already open source. Using XFree rather than Aqua also means more open source.
        - Stable. Darwin is already stable.
        - Secure. OSX seems fairly secure and its toolchain is obviously as secure as FreeBSD's.
        - Compatible. I don't know about this one, but it seems a lot of software can easily be ported from Linux & BSD to Darwin. How different are the kernel headers and so on?
        • > Linux is the 'natural' choice for me when using a PC, but I'm not sure I could say the same if I
          > owned a Macintosh. I'd probably just leave OSX running.

          It was probably out of habit, but the first thing I did after I bought a new Powerbook (previous computer was a Dell Inspiron dual-booting Red Hat 9 and Windows XP) was repartition the disk, leaving room for Yellow Dog Linux. So I started that install, then started reading... "Newest ATI cards not yet supported... Temperature controls may not work
    • "can't you just compile && install vanilla XFree and run it on top of the Darwin/Mach/BSD core?"

      Sure, but again, why? The lastest MacOS X (10.3) comes with XFree86 4.3.0 as a supported binary.

      IMHO, the biggest difference between MacOS X and a dual-boot Winux box is that you don't have to reboot the Mac to run Excel after you've been using GIMP. :-)

    • I don't think it's a question of users moving away from OS X to Linux, rather it's Linux users deciding to buy Macs rather than Wintel machines. Many Apple Linux users that I know simply wanted good hardware to run Linux on (especially *Books).

      Driver support can be easier as Apple computers are much less of a moving target than the myriad x86 laptops, each with their own blend of proprietary hardware. Compare how many models of laptops a company like Sony puts out, and then multiply that by every PC manufa
    • choice when i get my powerbook, i'm gonna try gentoo (+MoL) and osx and see which i like better.
    • Sometimes I run a Gentoo LiveCD on my Powerbook G4 for system diagnostics purposes... It supports a wider range of filesystems, so if I get an external drive and its partition type is something other than HFS+, I can generally use Gentoo to access and diagnose it. It could also be useful if something goes wrong with the system -- just boot and find where it hangs. I haven't had to rely on this "feature" yet though. :^)

      Other than that, I can't find a good enough reason to run Linux on this thing... Whil
    • The mach microkernel performs horribly. CPU-intensive work will do just fine on Darwin, but if you do anything that involves the OS, you'll pay a penalty.


      Darwin is a very odd UNIX, as well (.dynlib, Mach-O binary format), so a more famvilar UNIX like Linux or NetBSD might be a fine choice for the excellent G5 hardware.


      lmbench numbers backing up my OS claim [terizla.org]

    • Well, the kernel architecture of OS X is very different then linux. OS X uses a microkernel architecture, and the mach kernel, which is very different from the standard linux kernel.

      Device drivers for OS X are written differently as well, making use of IOKit, a nice C++ interface to the device tree which linux does not have. I havent written an IOKit driver, so i cant say which is easier, but personal prefernce on that front might make a driver developer choose linux over OS X.

      There are some other diff

  • G5 fans must be on 100%. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by heldlikesound ( 132717 ) on Tuesday November 11, 2003 @08:06PM (#7449407) Homepage
    When I was at WWDC, I had the chance to talk to the team of engineers at Apple that designed and programmed the cooling system for the G5. They said that if the openfirmware detects anything but an Apple operating system, all fans crank to 100% to avoid meltdown, as you don't want to rely on a foriegn OS to regulate the 9 fans, which is a bit of a juggling act as it is!
    • <tinfoil hat>Or so that the machines become completely impossible to use reasonably when running anything other than Mac OSX. I find it hard to work when the decebel level is quite that high...</tinfoil hat>
    • From this, it's a simple matter for Apple to void the warranty if you run an OS other than MacOS on the machine. That is, if you meddle around and try to take control of the cooling system and make it less like an Athlon jet-engine sounding box. Clearly it's designed so you either put up with the noise or 'put the hardware at risk' and void the warranty.

      Why couldn't they have made the fans and cooling system a seperate function independent of the Operating System. It could be driven by independent contr
    • I wonder why the fans are under control of the OS instead of being controlled by hardware temperature sensors instead? It would seem more reasonable to me to have the fans controlled via hardware sensors and firmware rather than the OS...
      • The fans are under the control of the OS because they do more than just react to increases in temperature. The software that controls the fans will actually slightly rev up the fans when the CPU load goes up, it does this BEFORE the cpus actually get hotter.. predictive cooling.

        Now THATs pretty cool. :-)
    • I'd be REALLY surprised if you didn't missunderstand them. Yellow Dog is a licensed Apple VAR. Apple has OK'ed their resale of Macs with YDL. They were pre-selling G5s with YDL, waiting for support for the fans.

      I'm not sure if they are selling yet or not. I'm pretty sure they don't have support in YDL for the fan control yet though.
    • Earlier today BenH released a G5 fan control driver [bkbits.net] for Linux.
      • I've installed linux and BSD a number of times, but I have to say that I haven't really a clue about how to install something such as that driver. Do you know of any places that would explain such a thing? Also, do you know if it is safe yet? I'm worried about beta testing something that might fry my box, because I don't think apple would really want to replace a computer because I stuck some unsupported hack on it.

  • Why use up CPU cycles controlling the fans? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...and what happens to the fans during a kernel panic?

    It seems strange that they wouldn't use an independent circuit for this sort of thing. A solid state one, even.
    • The fans spin up if the machine totally locks up. It's a fail safe to ensure the machine hardware is totally safe. It's actually the best solution for having software monitor the cooling.

      As I mentioned in another post, the control of the fan is smarter than just reacting to temperature probes. The software that controls the system will actually predictively cool when CPU load goes up, before the thermometers on the board actually register the increase.
  • Boot from OSX DVD, select "Apple Hardware Test" and run it...

    You'll be able to hear fans at Max speed... ;-)

    Oh the noise... Anyways, Apple will help kernel developers I guess...

    Besides being funny, G5 is like a jet on such situation, be warned.
  • I've tested the Gentoo Live CD, and it appears that this time around they're not lying. There was an initial announcement [gentoo.org] by a user on their forums a few months ago which was linked from a lot of web sites; this announcement was an obvious lie and Gentoo kept it up on their page rather than lose it and lose all of their publicity.

    What other distribution would tolerate this behavior?

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