wanting to try a virtual puppy under linuxmintppc

Virtual machines, emulation, etc.
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mmmrr
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wanting to try a virtual puppy under linuxmintppc

#1 Post by mmmrr »

hello,

i have an elderly apple destop, powerpc architecture, [ppc]:
a g4, 466MHz, 902 mb ram; it runs well, silently with the fans disconnected. i was hoping to run a puppy on it as i've been
happy running pups on pc's.

while puppy's own powerppc port project matures i found another
linux on mac distro at mintppc.org which uses a minimal
debian install as a base for ppc port of linuxmint.

it is a fine, active, helpful distro, in my experience. the developer
knows and likes puppy. porting puppy to ppc is a big job. mintppc
seems like a good opportunity to try puppy as a guest os.

i looked at the qemupuppy pages and installed it to a usb stick
but have not been able to get it to run on the g4.

does anyone have any suggestions as to other emulators/virtualizers?
cheers, mm

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mmmrr
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progress

#2 Post by mmmrr »

got qemu running, no accelerator kqemu for ppc, so too slow to use.
virtualbox not run on ppc--learned the long way--

learned about 'chroot' which with 'debootstrap' can call and install a debian -sid- into virtual existence. it's cli at the moment with 'schroot' to help with config stuff.

i'm looking for away to put a puplinux .iso or .exe into that chroot process. mount iso from onboard location then chroot it, see what happens,,,

plan b--get a puplinux in .exe form--try running it in wine...cheers, mm

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666philb
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#3 Post by 666philb »

there's vmware player but even if it works, i think it will be terribly slow on those specs. http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

666philb
Bionicpup64 built with bionic beaver packages http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=114311
Xenialpup64, built with xenial xerus packages http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=107331

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mmmrr
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vmware

#4 Post by mmmrr »

thanks for yr reply
if i remember rightly
i found the spec issue
compelling because on
closer reading vm was
not for ppc architecture,
g4 i'm running is ppc.

an iso as an exe,
wrap an exe around an iso
what do you think, 666philb?
cheers, mm

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Aitch
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#5 Post by Aitch »

hi mmmrr

Seen a few of your posts....also interestred in PPC Puppy, so thought this might be of interest

http://lowendmac.com/ed/packer/08jp/deb ... c-mac.html

Perhaps there is common code in dpup, *buntu, and debian, to allow puppy code conversion....way over my head...

see also

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=450401

or maybe Luci/Lupu and

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCDownloads

good luck

Aitch :)

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mmmrr
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#6 Post by mmmrr »

hi aitch, i've seen a few of yr posts, too

thanks for the links. puppy to ppc is over my head. powerpup's
post of mid-sept 2010....

"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.
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. (Somewhat, I still need to learn how to make a minimal linux.)"

then he adds cruxppc to the list of possibles...http://cruxppc.org/

seems like a debianppc base is well used to build on in linux/ppc land
i use a snappy mintppc on a debian base, mintppc.org, but whether
a puppy can be built from debian's ppc packages, given puppy's focus
on pc hardware,,,,and the debian packages have to be for the ppc architecture,,,,dpup et al must be debian pc packages, otherwise
dpups wouldn't run on pc's, right?

anyway, there is a lot of will to see a ppcpuppy, powerpup says
having ppc hardware in the hands of puppy experts would help and
i wonder if having some sort of virtual ppc running in puppy would
be helpful, certainly be easier and cheaper than having a ppc.

for the meantime i'm still trying to find a way to run puppy under mintppc

cheers, mm

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Aitch
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#7 Post by Aitch »

maybe this will be useful?

http://blog.computerant.com/2010/05/03/ ... l-to-work/

VPC on PPC MAC here

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/6078/virtual-pc

Its a .dmg file, so presumably executable, then you'll need a .vmx of whatever you want to run

I posted a very old puppy.vmx, [somewhere...] but there's a howto here [which can be tweaked for later versions]

http://linuxmini.blogspot.com/2007/10/h ... mware.html

and playdayz did a couple...[later one had vmtools iirc]

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=44707

also found this. in case anyone has oldskool macs

http://mac.linux.be/content/karmic-koal ... nstaller-0

Have fun :D

Aitch :)

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mmmrr
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#8 Post by mmmrr »

thanks aitch,

those are nice links, the guy behind the first one, computerant, is the person who posted on the mintppc forum saying it would be interesting to try running dsl or puppy in qemu on mintppc.

however, i need a virtual machine which meshes with
linux on ppc rather than mac on ppc, the other links are for mac os as host, alas.

'comparison_of_platform_virtual_machines' on wikipedia has a list of virtual machines with info re: host cpu, guest cpu, host os, guest os...i've been looking at it quite a bit since a couple of earlier attempts failed because of incomplete match to ppc linux as host and pc linux as guest.

however, i have seen 3 emulators for the ppc architecture under pc linux, which might be useful for puppians wanting to have a test bed to try porting puppy to the ppc: pear pc, sheepsaver, qemu .

if my understanding is correct, any one of these would set up a virtual ppc sandbox on one's puppy. qemu would not be so slow because when it runs on a pc one can use its accelerators, such as kqemu.

some topic drift here, i wonder if it would be better to begin
a new thread--ppc emulation on puppy--?

cheers, mm

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#9 Post by Aitch »

mmrr

IMHO a bit of drift is OK, as it may just be something someone is looking for or interested in, or just triggers an 'Aha!' moment.....

Maybe this VM will be useful for mint?

http://www.ewesoft.com/eve/index.html

Also Slax/slackintosh, with some good links, here

http://www.slax.org/forum.php?action=view&parentID=7881

includes this...QEMU for Mac OS X, which some may find useful

http://www.kju-app.org/

so maybe big_bass's slack port/puppy will crossover?

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=57484

[Joe, if you see hear of this...how about a TXZ to PPC MAC cross?...]

Couple/more other interesting links

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=56467

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasos

http://www.powerdeveloper.org/

http://us.generation-nt.com/trouble-net ... 98132.html

http://wiki.ppckernel.org/w/Mac_Netboot

http://code.google.com/p/ppcdroid/

There, ....now it's properly drifted..... :wink: :lol:

Aitch :)
Last edited by Aitch on Sat 09 Apr 2011, 16:18, edited 2 times in total.

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mmmrr
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#10 Post by mmmrr »

wow that's a pile o links, thanks aitch.
all for now, saturday a.m. errands here,
cheers, mm

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mmmrr
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further adventures

#11 Post by mmmrr »

so far i have not found a way to run puppy under mintppc, except for qemu,
where ir is too slow to be usable. finding a virtual machine which will run a linux
as guest os with x86 guest cpu under a linux host on a ppc host cpu seems
virtually haha impossible.

chroot is designed to run the same kernel of the same distro inside itself for
testing and package building. there are some very clever people who can create
a chroot for another kernel/distro than the host but it always involves individual
case fine tuning at the command line. it was suggested by one such that i try building
another mintppc inside this one, as useful practice in the procedure.

well,,,i haven't been able to get a squashfilesystem [.sfs] unpacked to a directory on
mintppc after four hours of googling, reading, cli-ing.

so porting puppy to ppc may be the realistic way to go. the breakthrough there might
be a virtual machine which emulates the ppc architecture [and both sheepshaver and pearpc
do that] under actual ppc or actual x86. that would let prospective porters test and build
on the same machine.

if anybody has noticed something i seem to have missed, please don't hesitate to post

cheers, mm

edit...removing the chroot-sid i created in the course of this exercise is extremely frustating.
the chroot appears in my personal file, with a lock icon, so i'm not surprised to read that as i am
not the owner, i can make no changes!--shades of windows!--

turns out chroot is symlinked to /var/lib...no directions i could find in first 5 google hits re removal
suggested /var/* and the suggestions that i did find for deleting entries in '/etc/fstab' were useless because there were no relevant entries in /etc/fstab.

when i followed suggestions to 'umount' chroot elements the prompt came back with the info
that the elements were being used and could not be unmounted.

when i entered 'ps aux' to get a pid # to use with a kill command --and wow i was looking forward to that--there was nothing in the list like the files identified with the chroot.

when i tried kill by name, prompt told me the name wasn't a process...so i'm going to hose the
curse-curse-swear-swear system and reinstall mintppc. cheers, mm

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looking to run a virtual puppy under mac ppc

#12 Post by mmmrr »

having made up my mind to reinstall mintppc to get rid of schroot experiment,
i saved data files but forgot about browser bookmarks/notes...
then began wandering around to see if there was any emulator-type
package in the debian testing and unstable repositories which i might have overlooked.

i was putting off the reinstall. mintppc is a fine piece of work but puppylinux
has spoiled me in several ways...a five minute install is one, always operating
with root privileges is another, being able to edit system files from the gui follows
from that i suppose.

anyway i stumbled onto user mode linux--UML--which is supported for ppc in debian
and has a useful looking website: /dev/loop.org.uk as well as a maintained spot on
sourceforge. it is supported in the linux kernel some kernels back. i think i'll have to post
a question there.

in the course the looking i found mention of a file '/etc/mstab' [where the things i could not
find in /etc/fstab - see previous post by me - ] where said things were sometimes to be found.
news to me so i hustled right over, there they were, the bindings which gave the busy/mounted/no-can-touch messages. i hosed those bindings pronto. the file icons vanished, except for one which
could not resist the remove command, though it tried.

i had forgotten to unmount it. the compu gave a blink as all data in /home re my use and settings vanished in the big remove...but no crash, no loss of wireless connection, unless the auto connect did its thing without me noticing.

since then i've up-rammed to 1.2 gb, re-jigged internal compu connections to set the original harddrive as slave [v. noisy, mac os x 2.* installed] and set the mintppc h-d as master.

the idea i have is to reduce the mintppc partition - mint = 6 gb/partition=150gb - then repartion the newly-vacated space,,,then try cloning the mac os x onto that quiet hard-drive where i can try using the built-in virtual pc app. to run puppy. on this machine. if the built-in virtual pc app. won't do it, then there are possibilities of a virtual machine to guest linux//x386 on host mac os x//ppc.

this system seems ever so slightly slower since the force-quit of the chroot removal: clicking on a close window button 'x' no longer is an instant vanishing-- but i'm not going to reinstall mintppc before trying the mac os move.

i'll have to switch the jumpers so that the mac drive is
master and the mint drive is slave, so that i can repartition from the macdrive while the mint drive is unmounted.

any comments or suggestions welcome, cheers, mm

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#13 Post by Aitch »

mmmrr

Interesting site, that devloop one....it led me here

http://winswitch.org/about/

Demo video of it in use....not a great vid, but.....

http://winswitch.org/video/

Seems there are windoze/linux/PPCMAC & IntelMAC versions....


For cloning OSX try Superduper [free trial] (OSX 10.4/5)

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/ ... ption.html

Image

or Carbon Copy (Also does OSX 10.2/3)

http://www.bombich.com/index.html

Image


I don't know if there are the same problems cloning OSX as I've had with windoze, running live....so good luck

Aitch :)

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#14 Post by mmmrr »

nice, aitch, thanks

great use of screenshot, text and links

cheers, mm

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harsh hours in compu-land

#15 Post by mmmrr »

reset h-drive jumpers in compu box to set mac os x 10.2.8 as master, mintppc as slave...but i guess this mac won't read linux because the only place i can see the minttppc drive is in disk utility as a blank drive to be partioned. i was hoping for something like gparted where i could resize an unmounted partition. i learn that gparted is for pc only.

the built-in disk copy app repeatedly fails with an internal error

carbon copy cloner won't run on older than os x10.4
looks like version 3.0 [2007] ought to work

superduper copy tool starts then quits immediately, repeatedly

built-in virtual pc is requires original entry info: name, organisation, purchase number of virtual pc. i don't have it, don't know how to hack around it

so it's back to google for an cloning/copying app and a partitioning app to
run with os x 10.2.8, or mac os 9, also on this unit.

if i set mintppc to master and mac to slave, however, i can see mac files.
i better see if i can make a bootable image of the mac from the mintppc
side, where lots of good, fresh tools reside.

all for now, cheers, mm

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#16 Post by Aitch »

ccc 2.3 does 10.2.8

http://www.5star-shareware.com/Mac/Util ... c-mac.html

external firewire [7200] bootable harddrives are useful for MACs

Aitch :)

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#17 Post by mmmrr »

thanks aitch,
working through carbon cloner info.
cheers, mm

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big step closer to seeing puppy on this g4

#18 Post by mmmrr »

!!-hooray-!!

debian installer on cd let me shrink mintppc partition.
took a bit of searching before i learned that when
the installer said ' no root file system' and sent me
back, [many times], it wanted me to choose '/'

then carbon copy cloner 2.3
[older version for older mac os x ], from
http://www.5star-shareware.com/Mac/Util ... c-mac.html

let me copy from home disk to new partition
and it booted! when i clicked its icon on the display
which followed holding down the option key on mac-keyboard

thanks again aitch, for pointing me to that older ccc,
i was getting so strung out i couldn't remember to keep googling.

so now i'm ready to try to run puppylinux/x86 on mac/powerpc
cheers, mm

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#19 Post by Aitch »

Cool

Hope you're going to give a run down on the final success.... :wink:

Aitch :)

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#20 Post by mmmrr »

well i'm looking forward to reporting success
but it just took a step backward...the mac os
in the machine boots 10.2.8 or 9.2.2, user chooses
which to boot depending on legacy software they
might use. choice is made before shutdown, applies
to next boot, that choice becomes default os until
changed from within running os.

my snooping after a virtual pc for mac old enough
for the mac os x 10.2.8 wasn't finding me one but
it was indicating that virtual pc 3 for mac, running
on 9.2.2 might be well worth checking, smaller, simpler
faster than some of the later versions of virtual pc.

so after my searching, before i found anything useful
to download, i set the mac to boot into os 9.2.2 when i
turned it on again. the appropriate little icon appeared
but when i clicked it --it couldn't find what it needed to
boot--

a pretty puzzle. such a cautionary tale i had to include it.
all for now, cheers, mm

hu

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