[gentoo-ppc-user] RE: Installing Gentoo on a Powermac G5

["Darren Kirby" <bulliver@gmail.com>]

Note: Sorry if this shows up twice, but both my responses (to David
and Joseph) seem to have been lost in a black hole...(Resending from
gmail).

quoth the Joseph Jezak:

> > 1. OS X is on the first sata drive, Gentoo will be on the second. Is it
> > still necessary to create the 'apple_bootstrap' partition if Gentoo will
> > be on its own complete disk?
>
> Yes.  Open Firmware looks for a HFS blessed partition to boot from,
> which is all the apple_bootstrap partition actually is.  It contains
> a copy of yaboot as well.  When ybin runs, it will tell OpenFirmware
> to boot from this device (well, that what the nvram write is for.
> If your kernel doesn't have nvram support, you'll have to set this
> manually).  Note that it doesn't really matter which disk this
> partition is on, but it's preferred to have it before the OSX
> partition so that if OSX resets the nvram, it will be the first
> blessed HFS partition found and still boot as normal.

Ok. I suppose I should have explained better. OS X is already installed, so I
imagine the bootstrap partition is already on the OS X disk right? Sorry to
be thick, but you say 'it doesn't matter which disk' it is on, so as long as
it is on one of them that's OK?

I should say here, my SATA drive just arrived an hour ago, and I installed it
and booted OS X, and it seems the drives were reversed, that is, the old disk
is disk 1, and the new one is disk 0. Does this make a difference...

I guess I'll just make the partition anyway, as I don't believe it takes a
whole lot of space.

> > 2. If I follow the PPC64 guide does this give me the 64bit userland? If
> > so, is there enough (hard) unmasked software to use this as a general
> > desktop machine? Is all software in the package database marked stable
> > under PPC64 64bit userland software? Can I mix and match PPC32 and PPC64
> > software? Any and all information on this issue would be most helpful, as
> > I don't think I completely understand it (I don't have an x86-64 machine
> > so I am mostly ignorant of 64bit issues).
>
> I can't speak too much for ppc64 (I only have ppc32 machines), but
> you have a few options.  A pure ppc64 machine won't work with
> everything.  For instance, there are issues with Mozilla based
> applications and ppc64, but KDE (and konqueror) should work great.
> You can also run a 32bit UL very easily and for desktop usage this
> is the recommended configuration afaik.  I'm not sure about a mixed
> environment.

Ok, I see on the mirrors there are PPC64 32 bit UL and 64 bit UL tarballs. To
tell the truth I am planning on using KDE anyway (and I can live without
firefox) , so I think I will give the 64bit a shot. If it doesn't work out
for me I will just do a reinstall. No big whoop. Just playing around for now
anyway.

Just to confirm, the packages in the database that are under PPC64 arch are
the 64 bit userland apps right? I have already checked and everything I
want/need is stable for PPC64...

> > 3. I have the 23 inch Cinema display and a ATI Radeon 9600 Pro vidcard.
> > Are there drivers that can make this setup work? I ask because I booted
> > the machine with a Kubuntu PPC livecd to play around and while the cli
> > worked, when it came time for X to start the screen went black and I was
> > forced to do a hard reset. I am not sure if this was just a problem with
> > Kubuntu, or some other reason. I am not too concerned with hardware
> > acceleration or anything, at most I just want to be able to watch DVDs.
>
> This should work just fine with DRI as well.  I have a Radeon 9600
> in my PB and it works very nicely with OpenGL acceleration, etc. :)

Sounds good!

I responded to David's post but it seems to not have made it to the list. In
that post I asked if all I needed to do was add:

VIDEO_CARDS="radeon"

to make.conf to get the drivers I need (assuming xorg 7.0). Is this right?

>
> Hope that helped,
> -Joe

Sure did, thanks a lot,
-d

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