PowerPup! A project to port Puppy to PPC macs!

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PowerPup
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#141 Post by PowerPup »

New update: I tried messing both with the T2-method and a bit will Woof (by modifying the woof script to use the Ubuntu PPC repositories,) and.....

Well, this isn't going to be easy. :P

Using the T2-method (which will be the most likely route,) something wasn't working right in the download script. it was going through it and saying it was complete (with a few download errors,) but as I looked in the download folder it was clear not everything had been downloaded. Going to need look into that.

I really want to be able to use the Woof scripts because it makes more sense to use pre-compiled packages (Like Ubuntu's PPC ones,) I'd rather just compile the Puppy specific packages for PPC than compiling ALL of them.

So apparently this is going to take a little script work in order to start working for PPC... Meaning it will take longer than I was hoping.

ArneBab
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#142 Post by ArneBab »

Many thanks for the update! I wish you bood luck!

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racepres
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#143 Post by racepres »

Good luck w/ it... Glad someone is doing it!
After my season winds down a bit I will try to help.
BTW, I would think that the Debian repository is more extensive than Ubuntu... Which dropped PPC support long ago... $0.02
RP

Tester
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power pc

#144 Post by Tester »

just want to keep up aney progeress.

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PowerPup
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#145 Post by PowerPup »

I'd been meaning to post this earlier this month, but never got around to it. :P

Anyway, things are getting a little tight financially so I'm going to need to find a summer job this year. So that probably means no time for working on the PowerPup project this summer. Which makes me really sad because others have donated to this and I still don't have anything yet. :(

The skills and knowledge required to get this accomplished is more than what I have at this moment. I really don't know if the "learn as you go" is the right way to approach this. I may just decide to put this off until I get some classes on Linux programming/building. (Whatever it's called. :P) Dunno if I'll go this way yet but I probably need consider it in order to get PowerPup working.

Anyway, hope all you PuppyLinux fans have a great summer!
Ben.

ChiJoan
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PowerPC Live CD...ARM for Puppy too?

#146 Post by ChiJoan »

I was looking on Distrowatch's links for floppy based or smaller distros for someone who had a question in this DW's Monday Newsletter replies...Anyway when I got to ttyLinux and saw it has an ARM and PPC version, I thought of all those G3 and G4 PowerPC laptops out there. True it's a far cry from Puppy, but maybe someone could use it.

http://www.minimalinux.org/ttylinux/

Good luck to all of us trying to make ends meet these days...

Joan in Reno

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PowerPup
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#147 Post by PowerPup »

Thanks for the link ChiJoan. It will come in handy very much. :D

Well I guess I should give a little update. I've been thinking some more on exactly how I should approach building PowerPup.

And I think I've come to the conclusion that I can't exactly make (at least not easily with my skill,) a PPC port of Puppy Linux. Puppy Linux was designed for PCs in mind, emphasizing on old hardware support, and with the latest Puppy 5, being able to build Puppy with packages from x86 distros.

Until the Puppy's building environment is improved for cross-platform support (Which would require Puppy Experts getting PPC hardware or something,) I think I should approach more of a "Puppy inspired OS for PPC."

Thanks to the discovery of ttylinux posted by ChiJoan, I now have a candidate base OS to try to build PowerPup on. :D
For those interested in trying ttylinux out, I've remastered the CD so it will boot. http://powerpup.yi.org/ttylinux-powerpc-11.2.iso.gz (I've emailed the iso to Douglas, the maker of ttylinux, so he can put it on his site.)

I might try some other distro as well, one that has caught my attention is Frugalware Linux, which at first was based on Slackware, but now they maintain their own repository of packages built straight from original sources. (The structure is still based on Slackware I think.)
Plus they maintain PPC binaries. Which will make my job easier. :D (Somewhat, I still need to learn how to make a minimal linux.) :P

I might even reconsider Finnix, which is Debian based. Although Finnix is somewhat "pudgy." :P

I even thought about Yellow Dog Linux 5.0.2, since it was their last version to support G3s. Not sure about this one because it's somewhat outdated.

Anyway, hope you all enjoyed your summer, I'll be heading to college in about a week. So I'm not too sure when I'll start working on PowerPup, but I have a feeling I'm moving in the right direction. :D

Ben.

ChiJoan
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What about CruxPPC for further research...

#148 Post by ChiJoan »

Good luck in school, but may be someone will keep the ball rolling...

http://cruxppc.org/

Joan in Reno

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PowerPup
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#149 Post by PowerPup »

Thanks. :D

Yeah, I kinda forgot about CruxPPC, I'm sure there is a link on some former page. :roll:

Nice to see they came out with an update. I will take CruxPPC into consideration as well. :D

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mmmrr
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long way round, virtual puppy in debian base mint on ppc-g4

#150 Post by mmmrr »

i posted this in the virtualization forum so please reply there.

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=65573

hello folks,

i tried qemu but without acceleration which is not available for ppc
it was slow: click to close window, count to three, window closes

virtualbox ose [open source edition] has me still scrambling to get it installed, hours and hours. just learned virtualbox won't go on ppc.

so it seemed like a good time to see if anybody has a suggestion. i'm going to take a look at other vm's,,xen,
lxc, user mode linux, schroot. also maybe try installing
virtualbox onto a pc machine to see how it goes when it is
installed.

cheers, mm

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mmmrr
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#151 Post by mmmrr »

hi ben,

i hope this is okay with you.
there was interest, other than mine,
about porting puppy to powerpc at mintppc.org/forum.

http://www.mintppc.org/forums/viewtopic ... 18&start=0

i'm enjoying the mintppc but was trying to find away
to run puppy, virtually, inside mintppc. i've been posting
results, slim, and questions, several, on mintppc forum.

the developer/maintainer of mintppc suggested that a port
of puppy to ppc was doable in his opinion. in my reply i agreed,
mentioned yr work, linked to the topic here, to yr website, and
included yr useful summary as of last september[2010].

if this is a mistake on my part i'll remove it; my apologies
for not asking ahead of acting...hope things are going well
with you,

cheers, mm

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PowerPup
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#152 Post by PowerPup »

Hey mm,

It's okay that that you share my work and progress. If there are PPC Linux users out there, somewhere, that are more experienced than I, wanting to take the challenge of porting puppy, then by all means do share. ;)

Speaking of PowerPup, I plan on working on it again this summer, hopefully I'll get somewhere with it and have a minimalistic gui running. :D (Can't wait for summer, it rains a lot here during spring...)

Yeah I've been watching MintPPC, plan on trying it out sometime. Maybe during summer as well.

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Aitch
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#153 Post by Aitch »

Hi Ben/Powerpup

Still hanging in there....

I'm still watching/providing links, such as...

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=65059

It'll happen one day, I just know it.... :D

Aitch :)

linuxopjemac
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#154 Post by linuxopjemac »

I am willing to help but I don't want to start from scratch. Did anyone compile all packages needed for making a recent version of Puppy? What are the current problems and how did people try to solve them?

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Aitch
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#155 Post by Aitch »

Not sure if this has been posted before, but all info in one place!

Ted Dog has been working on Puppyfying a MacMini [intel], but has said;
.....Yes sorry the PPC puppy version I almost had workng years ago never could work around Xorg, that and the removal of OtherOS on my dev PS3 by SONY was the final blow. Still have the dev frozen in storage. I looked at if briefly when they found out how to regain linux on PS3.....
So, maybe worth pm'ing him, as well as read the various links in this thread....it's been awhile, but I know, I've posted loads!

Ben, Do you have anything maybe, anyone could work on?

There are several new build methodologies available in the main forum, but I think only Amigo's is cross-OS

Aitch :)

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Ted Dog
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iPuppy pre-anouncement

#156 Post by Ted Dog »

All the issues running puppylinux (fatdog64) on mini-mac have been solved. There is no real big changes, that a reordering of modules, init and small config files and one massive download from NVidia to correct Xorg and pipe the sound via HDMI.

After some replies on the MacPup thread Ive decided to name the project iPuppy since no other 'active' project uses that. I guess the first project name choice of AntiMacPup was a bit adversarial.

So it will boot in Apple 'BIOS' compatibility mode but the real iPuppy will boot in EFI mode by passing Apple Chooser and cutting boot time from 3 minutes to under 30 seconds.

This puppylinux did boot in EFI mode but no picture or sound had to go by the flash pattern of the light on my USB drive and a on-screen hicchup when it tried to start X windows.

I'll ask my nephew (the alpha mac-head of our family) if I can use the PPC mac left in the garage for the last 8 months, to dust off the PPC T2 code and see if the Xorg issue has magically disappeared. If you guys know any project using X successfully with PPC give me a PM. I have cross compile for PCC in stasis and need to relearn T2 inside of wolf system anyway.

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Aitch
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#157 Post by Aitch »


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PowerPup
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#158 Post by PowerPup »

Aitch wrote:Ben, Do you have anything maybe, anyone could work on?
The only thing I accomplished was swapping x86 binaries with PPC ones in the initrd, that way the ISO would boot.

The main problem was I don't know how to put a linux OS into a squashfs file. (Well, I kinda do. But reading how and knowing how are two different things. :P ) Then there was the issue of keeping it small enough to fit on a CD.


@Ted Dog: I haven't used that many PPC Linux distros but the ones I have tried with working Xorg are the following:

Slackintosh 12.1
Ubuntu 6.10 Live CD PPC
Frugalware -- (Had to use the xorg.conf generated from the Ubuntu Live CD to work. The bootsplash image wouldn't show in true color even though the desktop was fine.)
GeeXboX was a live CD that I tried in my PowerMac G4. Worked quite nice. But their homepage doesn't seem to be working. You can download it here.


My summer has turned out to be a lot busier than I thought it would be. I haven't even touched PowerPup yet. Guess it's been so long I'm not sure where to start. I've even had second thoughts on whether I want it based on PuppyLinux or not. Whether to use jwm or work with something else to make it feel more "Mac." I want PowerPup to be essentially an alternative for Mac users as PuppyLinux is for Windows users. The main issue is I don't use Linux enough to work with it. Much less to make my own OS. I need to find a place to setup a permanent Linux machine so I can sit down and really learn Linux, some programming, init scrpting, etc. Then maybe I can eventually learn to make an OS. There's just so many things I want to do and not enough time to learn them all at once.

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Dougal
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#159 Post by Dougal »

PowerPup wrote:The main problem was I don't know how to put a linux OS into a squashfs file. (Well, I kinda do. But reading how and knowing how are two different things. :P ) Then there was the issue of keeping it small enough to fit on a CD.
Just put the directory tree into a partition/directory, then run squashfs on it:

Code: Select all

mksquashfs /mnt/home/new-filesystem /mnt/home/pup_xxx.sfs
However, you might need to set the endianness (-le/-be) if it's different than x86...
What's the ugliest part of your body?
Some say your nose
Some say your toes
But I think it's your mind

ChiJoan
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MintPPC installed via netboot on spare hard drive...

#160 Post by ChiJoan »

I tried Debian 6.04 PPC net install, but reboot failed to bring up start button bar. Daily Lubuntu 12.04 failed to even get that far, but MintPPC worked, but online video is so slow. I think this needs more work with Apple dumping support for all these 16-bit Macs.

Joan in Reno

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