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Linux PPC64 for Power Mac G5 Quad

mac57mac57

mac57mac57

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 2, 2024
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Myrtle Beach, SC
This is undoubtedly a difficult question, but I am hoping for a simple answer...

I am looking for a PPC64 Linux distro that is known to boot successfully on a Power Mac G5 Quad. Preferably, this distro has a "live CD/DVD" to allow testing of it before install.

Does anyone currently run such a distro?

So far, I have tried Adelie Linux, both the 32 but and 64 bit versions, but neither boots successfully. They both came up in GRUB but failed to boot.Then I moved to Debian 12 PPC64. Like Adelie, it booted successfully into GRUB, but it is not "live"; it is an install-only DVD. I am reluctant to install, lest it mess up the beautifully configured Sorbet and Tiger installs also on the machine.

I should add that my Quad has an nVidia Quadro FX 4500 graphics card. I understand that not all distros may support this card.

Returning to the question looking for a simple answer, does anyone currently run a PPC64 Linux on a Power Mac G5 Quad?

Thanks!
 
Well @Doq, the Beta5 version did get a lot further but ultimately it seems to have "hung up".

It came up to GRUB, and I selected the full KDE version to boot. The usual Linux streaming startup messages went clattering by, and when it was all over, it cleared the screen ... and never did anything else. The DVD spun down and it just sat there. I gave it ten minutes, and nothing further happened.

I tried again, this time selecting the Text Only option. Same result. Full set of start up messages, the screen was cleared and then it sat there until I turned it off.

Is there anything obvious I am missing?

Else, I have a Debian 12 PPC64 that also comes up and runs, but it is purely an installer DVD, not a "live CD". In the end, I may have to give it a whirl. I have never used Debian, preferring smaller and more optimized Linux distros, but this may be the time to test it out. Regrettably, it will nuke at least one hard drive, repartitioning it and so on.
 
I have been reading the Debian forums, and it would appear that the nVidia 6600 graphics card is not supported. This is for Debian. Is it possible that this is for Adelie as well? The machine I am testing in is equipped with an nVidia 6600.

My Air Quad has quite a bit of non-vanilla hardware in it (eSATA card, Firewire 800 port card, nVidia Quadro FX 4500, etc.) or attached to it (Apple iSight camera, Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse and more) which I was afraid might throw off the boot. So, I used my LCS Quad instead, which is pretty much perfectly vanilla. However, the graphics card is an nVidia 6600.
 
I can highly recommend ArchPOWER. There is a true PPC64 variant with 64 bit kernel and applications as well as a PPC6432 version with 64 bit kernel but 32 bit applications. I run the latter since it is more stable and has better application support (ArchPOWER PPC64 is ELFv2 so no precompiled applications for other distros will run).

There is unfortunately no live version and since this is Arch Linux the entire installation process in manual so you will need to put in some time and effort and make sure to have both the ArchPOWER Github wiki and the official Arch Linux wiki documentation ready. It is the best PowerPC Linux distribution in my opinion.

I ran it on my G5 Quad and while I had best results with far newer PC graphics cards such as the HD 5770, Nvidia should work ok, I think I tested the 6600 as well. You might need the xf86-video-nouveau package though.

ekn2lV6tNZb9rFHcYRQZeRlr.png
 
Interesting, @Matias_ thanks for bringing this up.

I ran an x86 version of Arch Linux as my daily driver for over a year back in 2005-2006, after I decided I was sick of Windows and before I moved to Macs in 2006-2007. I loved the configurability of Arch. Yes, it was a pain at times, but I configured and built a slick, fast and lightweight Linux that just raced on my PC. It was a great environment to work in. I still have that machine, and Arch stills runs it. It is still incredibly fast.

The only reason I moved to Macs at that time was because there was no version of Photoshop for Linux, and I was (and still am) "married" to Photoshop. Macs had two key selling features: they weren't Windows, and they did support Photoshop, plus, with their BSD heart, they could run all my Linux favorite apps via what was then called DarwinPorts (now MacPorts). It was a slam dunk, and I have never looked back. Lest you think it, yes I am very familiar with GIMP, but I have always preferred Photoshop.

Even now, my interest in adding Linux to my Quad is more nostalgia and technical curiosity, plus a nice technical challenge, than a real possibly alternative to Mac OS X. I have invested heavily in Mac hardware and software and there is no going back. I know Macs and love them too well.

Now meantime, I have read some very negative comments about Arch recently, suggesting that it has become "fat" and "slow" ... suffering from the same bloat that effects so many other software products. In its day, Arch was the Greyhound of Linux distros, but not so now, at least so I have read. Can you comment?

I will have a look either way, and do some reading and research. Arch is an emotional favorite of mine. I would love to be able to run a PPC64 version of an up-to-date Arch.
 
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I tried Adelie Linux PPC64-1.0-beta5 live DVD on my AirQuad, equipped with an nVidia Quadro FX 4500 and it came right up! ...rather slowly to be sure, but that is the way things are with live CD/DVDs. It came up into X-Windows and KDE just fine. It was connected to the internet and the lightweight browser that comes with it was able to connect to the outside world.

Clearly, Adelie Linux 1.0 PPC64 doesn't like the nVidia 6600 either (similar to my Debian 12 comment above). That is a strange omission, given that Apple routinely shipped G5 configurations with this card. I am assuming that there must be an available Linux driver for this card, but it is a bit of a Catch-22; you need to get Linux running to get the driver, but without the driver you cannot get Linux going. So, this restricts the availability of Adelie Linux PPC64 to the subset of machines with the nVidia Quadro FX 4500? I suspect that other cards must be supported to. I suspect further that when I dig into the Adelie documentation a bit more, I will find a list of supported and unsupported hardware.

For now, I am happy that the live DVD came up and ran. I *can* install it if I want. Now I am going to try ArchPOWER and see how that goes.
 
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@Doq, it appears that Adelie Linux does not include or support GIMP. Can you confirm that? I am also reading conflicting information on whether any modern web browsers are supported, such as Firefox and Chrome? Can you shed some light on this?

If I go forward and install it, are there any tips and tricks, or alternately "gotchas" that you have discovered running it on your Quad?

Thanks!
 
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@Matias_, as I consider ArchPOWER, I was checking online for supported packages. Since ArchPOWER is an unsupported port of Arch Linux, what I kept finding was that pretty much everything has to be built from source. Can you confirm that? Thanks!
 
Sorry for the late response, I got caught up in a whole web of things.

I can only comment from my personal experience: I have been using Arch Linux as my daily driver since 2023. I too, got sick of WIndows. This was before I got into (PowerPC) Macs even, but I had some experience with FreeBSD.

I've primarily been running it on a ThinkPad T520 and it has been mostly smooth sailing so far. My system consumes very little RAM on a graphical session and feels quite performant for a 14 year old dual core. The same can be said about ArchPOWER on a G5 Quad, it feels quite snappy really. So I don't know why people are calling it fat and slow, it certainly doesn't seem that way to me. But the unfortunate reality is that as systems get faster and more complex, all software is getting more bloated.

ArchPOWER is mostly maintained by a single person so the amount of packages is a bit limited compared to other more mainstream distributions but Adelie Linux has a very limited package count as well from my experience. Adelie Linux is also kind of a nonstandard Linux distribution with the musl standard c library so it's a pain to compile software for it.

So, regarding packages and modern web browsers: ArchPOWER does have it's own repositories with a pretty decent selection of packages: https://repo.archlinuxpower.org/base/. A small selection of additional packages provided by a community member are here: https://github.com/techflashYT/archpower-extra-pkgs/

These will let you setup a full KDE, TDE, Xfce or IceWM desktop. In regards to modern web browsers there are phantomsatellite-gtk2 (Pale Moon fork) and the various webkit based browsers (epiphany, midori, vimb. But webkit has been hit or miss for me on ppc64, which is one of the reasons why I run the ppc6432 iso). There is a ppc64 only Firefox package but I was unable to get it to work, I think it requires a newer POWER ISA. Only Debian has gotten up to date Firefox running on ppc64 G5s unfortunately. Chrome is a no-go, it is very hard to compile, takes an eternity to do so and needs a lot of patches for our old Big Endian PPC/POWER systems.

My browser of choice is phantomsatellite with the noscript plugin because only TenFourFox and it's derivatives have a JavaScript JIT compiler for PPC. Expect JavaScript to be very slow on Linux, but actual page rendering and web compatibillity should be miles ahead of MacOS because TenFourFox/Interweb/Aquafox are just very dated at this point.

There is also a gimp package but it is still based on gimp 2 because gimp 3 does not work yet. And gimp 2 crashes when loading in an image but once you restart the software it will recover the image and you will be able to edit and save as you please.

So no, you can get quite far without compiling from source. But, and this is where I think the power (no pun intended) of Arch really comes into play: it is very easy to compile your own packages in case you do need something that is not in in the ArchPOWER repositories. All Arch Linux packages, whether it be official ones or unofficial ones from the AUR, are in their original form distributed as PKGBUILDs, basically a recipe on how to compile a package which gets parsed by makepkg, part of Arch Linux's powerful build system.

Since ArchPOWER hardly differs from regular Arch, you can often just retrieve an x86 PKGBUILD from where you prefer and build it locally for PPC with the makepkg -Asi command (the A flag ignores the architecture listed in the PKGBUILD). Hence I do have a lot of packages locally compiled on my system. The G5 quad makes easy work of it.

I hope I have adressed your questions properly, this turned out to be quite a bit longer than I wanted it to be but this sort of thing gets me really enthusiastic and then I write way, way too much hah. I will happily answer any further questions.

P.S. : I just rebooted my ThinkPad and checked, my minimal graphical wayland setup idles just under 450MB of RAM on an empty desktop with 1 terminal window and no other applications open.
 
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Thanks @Matias_.

Compare and contrast... it is starting to sound like Debian PPC64 is the closest thing I can find to a fully featured Linux distro for Power Mac G5s, and even it is not part of the main Debian release.

Debian vs. Arch - any thoughts?
 
All I can say is that Debian didn't work for me. I have a headless Debian PPC64 SSD for development but I have never been able to get a GPU accelerated graphical desktop going, I think upstream Mesa was broken.

I don't want to discourage you from trying though, it could have been fixed by now. One of the developers got a PowerMac G5 and pushed a bunch of fixes. If Debian does work it would be a great option because it has a huge number of available precompiled packages and up to date Firefox.
 
@Matias_, what can I say? ... me too. I cannot make Debian 12 PPC64 install. The installer runs just fine, and is actually fairly "friendly", but there are no mirrors that it will accept, even the one at powerprogress.org, hence a very minimal system, and the GRUB install fails every time. I found and ran the grubfix.sh script but it takes all kinds of errors while running and I don't think GRUB gets installed at all. When the installer finishes finally, the result will not boot.

This is disappointing, but there it is. Back to the drawing board.

So far, Adelie Linux looks good, but it is non-standard, not using the usual development tools, hence of little value to me. I don't want Linux just for the sake of having Linux!

I will try ArchPOWER as a final step, but it looks pretty difficult to deal with too. I'll report back.
 
T2 linux is still current and maintained for old hardware:

forums.macrumors.com/threads/t2sde-linux-installation-stuck-in-grub-shell.2429849/
 
You do indeed have to pick one of a very select few install ISOs -- one that has been modified by the primary debian PPC maintainer, Adrian, to add the needed support for HFS disks. You need that to allow booting to happen, but it is currently not free (Apple licence) and so debian can't add it to all the ISOs. Work is going on that.

You also have to update the keys in the access database, and use a very select set of mirrors. The exact list is kept, along with all this information, and a LOT more, on the debian powerpc mailing list:


which I would highly suggest you subscribe to and use as your primary source of truthful and helpful information.

If you have any troubles getting debian powerpc installed, post up to that mailing list and Adrian will get you sorted.
 
when booting debian on powerpc, the boot happens from a small HFS disk that holds GRUB. Once GRUB is booted, it can access all the drives, and you can select any of a bunch of options, the usual default option being the primary drive where you installed debian, of course.

apparently the hiccup is that install ISO needs to be able to create, format, and write GRUB onto that HFS drive for this magic to work, and that is why this currently works only with a specially-enhanced boot ISO, which Adrian puts up every few months.

but just grabbing some random debian powerpc boot ISO is not likely to get you the magic one with HFS support added, unless you happen to be unusually lucky. In which case, forget debian and go to Vegas. :>
 
Matias_ said:
The symptoms you're describing to me sound like you picked the outdated ISO, I also made this mistake at first. I think the one you need is this one: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/current/debian-12.0.0-ppc64-NETINST-1.iso
Click to expand...

Thanks @Matias_. Apparently I did pick the wrong installer. Funny though, the file you mention above has exactly the same filename as the one I used BUT the file size is quite different... two different versions with the same filename. No wonder Debian is hard to deal with! :)

kencu said:
The exact list is kept, along with all this information, and a LOT more, on the debian powerpc mailing list:

Debian Mailing Lists -- Index for debian-powerpc
which I would highly suggest you subscribe to and use as your primary source of truthful and helpful informatio
Click to expand...

Thanks as well @kencu. The mailing list idea is a good one, and I will subscribe.

Meanwhile, I also played around with the ArchPOWER installer. The installer came right up, and I reviewed the Wiki notes on installing it. I then spent a half hour plus trying to figure out what device names Arch had given to my drives, always a problem with new Arch installs. After reviewing the dmesg logs from the boot, I tinkered with /etc/fstab and /mnt, and then started methodically running through device names/numbers. It turns out that in Arch's world, my three disks (two internal, one eSATA) are sda3, sdb3 and sdc3, with sdc3 being the disk I want to install to.

I ran out of time at that point and stopped there. Now, with a new lead on Debian, I will try that again, only returning to Arch if Debian once more leaves me at a dead end ... and perhaps Adrian might help move me past it if I hit such a thing.
 
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I understand we're well past this, but:
mac57mac57 said:
@Doq, it appears that Adelie Linux does not include or support GIMP. Can you confirm that? I am also reading conflicting information on whether any modern web browsers are supported, such as Firefox and Chrome? Can you shed some light on this?

If I go forward and install it, are there any tips and tricks, or alternately "gotchas" that you have discovered running it on your Quad?

Thanks!
Click to expand...
Didn't realise you needed GIMP.

That'll be a problem you'll run into a lot when running Adelie, or any musl-based distro for that matter. Every piece of software has to be recompiled against the shipping libc (whether that be glibc or musl or anything else). If it's not in the software repo (which in this case, it's not), you'd have to resort to both a. compiling from source and b. hoping the software you're compiling supports the target libc (GIMP probably does).

Adjacently, if your distro journey continues to fail you, Gentoo will always* be an option, and on a Quad shouldn't take multiple days (like my poor G4 1.67).
 
Thanks @Doq, but I wouldn't say my distro journey is failing, at least not yet. I didn't expect this to be smooth... as in all things, I will persevere. I am an "old hand" at Linux - I will beat this thing into submission sooner or later.

For now, I am focused on Debian 12 PPC64. I will only move on to another distro if/when I hit a definitive dead end. Debian is a massive, sprawling release. I can get everything I am interested in from a Linux packages perspective there to be sure. It is also blessed with a large and active user community, which should make topic-specific help more easy to come by.

As to Gentoo, I have heard that it is horrifically difficult to get going, and employs a heavy "build from source" approach. If I end up having to work with a "difficult" distro, I will focus on Arch. It is an old favorite. I have installed it in many x86 environments and it is great. It is a pain to get configured, but then the result runs like "greased lightening" ... fast, really fast.

This is because Arch pretty much forces you to select and configure almost everything. With Arch, I focus on configuring lightweight but functional Linux elements. For example, I run XFCE, but use Rox Pinboard as my desktop - small, fast, hugely functional - it has a pleasing appearance as well, which is nice. feh makes a great, lightweight image viewer. Leafpad is a great lightweight text editor, and so on ... it is all available individually, and if you build a whole environment out of it, it is just screamingly fast.

Some things simply can't be lightweight though. Image editing is inherently complex, and so the associated software tends to be as well. GIMP, DigiKam and so on are all "heavy". AbiWord and gnumeric are "mid weight" I would say, but definitely not lightweight.

Anyway, the journey continues! Thanks for the insights!
 
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mac57mac57 said:
Thanks @Matias_. Apparently I did pick the wrong installer. Funny though, the file you mention above has exactly the same filename as the one I used BUT the file size is quite different... two different versions with the same filename. No wonder Debian is hard to deal with! :)
Click to expand...

Progress, but not success. The new install media did work much better. It found and used a mirror, it installed GRUB and it appeared to run to completion successfully. HOWEVER, the result would not boot.

I am guessing that this is because I installed Debian 12 PPC64 onto an external eSATA drive. Perhaps it NEEDS to be installed on an internal SATA bus drive?

Happily, I have two drives in my AirQuad and I am busily moving files around now to free up one entire drive.

Once that is done, I will attempt the installation again, this time to an internal drive.

Fingers and thumbs crossed.
 
I have debian 12 installed on four active PowerPC machines, two G4s and two G5s. In all cases, I did a garden variety install, putting debian on the internal drive using a boot ISO CD. The G4s were IDE drives, the G5s SATA. The G5s run ppc64 debian.

I give debian the entire disk to use at it wishes. I don't try to multiboot different OSs off one disk drive -- people have had problems trying to make that work reliably, although some have apparently done it.

Several of my machines have a second internal drive that I use for MacOS, one running Tiger and the other Leopard. I hardly ever run Tiger or Leopard on them any longer though ... just to play some old game once in a blue moon.
 
Thanks for the pointers @kencu. The new installer worked well, ran to completion and the result booted into GRUB. So far, so good.

I started Debian 12 PPC64 using the first selection on the grub menu and it took off. Two or so screens of startup messages later (multiple errors were reported in those screens as they went by but they were moving too fast to record them), the screen cleared and that was it... nothing further happened. After ten minutes of waiting, I gave up and restarted.

I selected a lower Linux kernel version from the GRUB selections the next time around, but same result. I briefly saw a login prompt, but then the screen cleared again and that was all. I tried typing in my user ID and password, but there was no response.

So... I am not sure where to go next. I am cautious about this. I don't want Debian messing up my finely tuned Mac OS X Sorbet install, so I don't want to get too crazy.

I will try one of the "recovery mode" GRUB selections as a last resort, and then I may have to ask my newfound friends at the Debian PPC64 email list.
 
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