iBook G4 and Debian PPC 3

Well... That was definitely something else...

Since I had the 30GB IDE drive in Sae-chan (and had the Debian installation on it), I didn't want to use that drive for Taiga (for whatever reason that I can't remember). My other options were Sae-chan's actual drive (160GB IDE), Taiga's drive (32GB CF card in an IDE adapter), or and 8GB CF card. I opted for the latter, seeing as the other two were big "no-nos".

Debian failed to install to the 8GB CF card in the IDE adapter (for reasons still unknown) four or five times (I didn't keep a proper count), and I tried a couple different things... From using Sae-chan's combo drive, to using the net-install disk.

Eventually, I snapped and just used the 30GB drive and it worked first time without a problem (I believe I was also using the [recently released] 7.7.0 Xfce disk as well), so I tried once more on the 8GB CF card, making the swap size larger since I thought that was the problem.

And I was wrong, as it still failed. I went for a semi-blind install on the 32GB CF card, seeing that was my only real option to for proper testing, and it also installed without any problems. Again, I have no idea why the installation kept failing on the 8GB CF card (I even tried using GParted to make the partition map as "Apple" - "mac" as GParted has it - while I was in the 30GB installation), and the best I can say is that 8GB is just not enough for Debian (the drive size itself, not the space used).

I thought I was clear after that, but I was certainly wrong. The next problem was the power management for the display... Under the right circumstances, it works as it technically should, but for whatever reason, doesn't work correctly. Instead of a proper black-screen or turning the display off, the back-light stays on (when it clearly shouldn't) and the picture fades from the LCD in a weird way - the colours fade away (usually green is the slightly faster one) and leaves a weird patch of "blocks" which was the image. Maybe the picture fade from the LCD is normal, but since I've always seen the back-light shut off when it's supposed to, I can't say if it is normal or not.

While installing Debian on Sae-chan on the 160GB drive, I played around with the power management settings a lot to try to get the back-light to turn off properly, which never did; I also tried some video settings (trying to disable framebuffer or KMS), which also didn't work. The option I reached - an alternative I didn't want to use - was to pull the plug on the display and use an external monitor. I shut Taiga off and focused on getting Bluetooth and Wifi for Sae-chan, so that I can remove the 15 metre Cat6 cable running to the other side of the house (I didn't think I was going to spend as long I did with Taiga, so I thought I only needed the Cat6 for a couple hours). I then finished up installing what I needed on Sae-chan and went to bed after a 20-hour day.

This morning, I left the bed at roughly eleven (even though I wanted to sleep more) and grabbed one of the monitors that I used to use for Mei-chan, since it had speakers. After slightly rearranging the table and setting the monitor up, I booted Taiga and went to the display settings to disable Taiga's screen. I was quite displeased to see that the back-light did not turn off, and, before shutting Taiga down to unplug the cable to the screen, I decided to see what sort of resolutions I could use with the monitor.

My displeasure was counteracted when I saw that I could use the proper resolution of the monitor - 1440x900. While I had to slightly fix the video position on the monitor (third time I had to do so), it was nice to see that I'll have a lot more screen real estate for the windows (Transmission at its narrowest width takes almost half the screen at 1024x768). Needless to say, I shut Taiga down and unplugged the cable to the screen.

I then tried to get sound to work with Taiga (though on Sae-chan it's just a beep when, say, you try to backspace a text file with nothing in it), but couldn't get anything to work, so I just gave up on it, seeing as it was hardly important to have sound.

The only thing that's wonky is the Bluetooth mouse - if I turn the mouse off and back on while Debian is running, the input service (which makes the mouse move the cursor) doesn't reconnect properly with the mouse and I'm forced to add the device as a "new device". While I'm used to turning the mouse off when I'm not using it, I guess I'm just going to have to leave it on or maybe not use it at all, I'll have to see what happens.

Despite wasting so much time, things still turned out quite well - all the MD5 checksums that I used to spot-check the file transfers checked out exactly (though it's only about 7% of the files); I have a nice, large resolution to work with on Taiga (albeit Taiga's more like a Ronco Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ oven); updated programs (more updated than ones on OS X 10.4.11); a more stable FTP service (when I install it); and finally no major problems which would force me to revert to OS X 10.4.11 (heck, installing Debian solely from the disk still is faster than installing 10.4 from its disks).

iBook G4 and Debian PPC 2

Debian seems to run a bit better than OS X 10.4.11, but I haven't done extensive testing - mainly just testing LibreOffice out, since it's what I usually use Sae-chan for. Other than LibreOffice, most of the programs seem to start up a bit faster.

I had a horrible time getting the wifi to work with the first installation, and it was because I was installing pretty much anything that seemed to have to do with wifi, so the kernel was probably confused when I installed the b43 driver; I reinstalled Debian and then followed the instructions on Debian's wiki, and it worked after that.

Bluetooth took some work, and it was that I was installing a lot of Bluetooth programs/drivers - that wasn't the actual problem though, it was that connecting the mouse was weird. When I reinstalled, I just installed the GUI configuration program thing and then went to set it up, which got slightly weird again. What it was doing was connecting but not working as a mouse, even though I hit "always accept" when it asked me to connect the device. I actually have to connect the mouse as a new device, so that it registers it as an input device (and cycle the power to the mouse if I reboot).

Transferring files over ethernet seemed to be better having the host computer (Taiga in this case) send the files with Filezilla to the client computer (Sae-chan) instead of the client computer requesting the files from the host computer. I can't exactly say if OS X's built-in FTP's to fault, but when the initial batch of files I sent checked out fine, it's hard not to say so.

I realized why I wanted to keep OS X: to play most of the games I used to play on the Performa 550 with the Mac OS Classic emulator, so I'll be having a dual-boot environment for Sae-chan, but I'll probably have Debian be the default OS to boot to.

Right now, I'm waiting for the rest of the files to transfer before I can begin testing the Wifi/Bluetooth in Debian with Taiga, but it's taking a while. I'm expecting things to go well, since I've already done enough preliminary testing with Sae-chan, and I know what to install now.

I'll be back with the results.

Debian GNOME Part 1

Seeing how nice Debian was on the G5, I decided to test it out on Triela.

After installing, I was met with GNOME fallback, as GNOME 3 was not able to load because of hardware issues - in other words: I need to install FGLRX (Debian decided to use some "random" VESA" driver instead...)

Needless to say, I didn't really test anything past there, as I couldn't exactly remember how to install FGLRX, nor did I want to have to fiddle around with it again, knowing that the open-source Radeon driver covers all the GPUs I own (the highest being the AMD Radeon HD 6770).

I might test again on a desktop, but I'm sure if I want to.

iBook G4 and Debian PPC 1

I was pondering yesterday to put Debian on Sae-chan and Taiga (my best friend's iBook G4 that he's having me use), and I went with testing it on Sae-chan today (albeit, on Sae-chan's original 30GB HDD).

Works better than Ubuntu 10.10/11.04 from what I remember of those, and I remember that 11.04 ran Sae-chan hot and with the fan on most of the time.

Since I didn't want to completely reassemble Sae-chan, I had to plug in a spare mouse to use to get the Bluetooth to work. The Bluetooth is a bit glitchy, and I had to spend a bit of time to get it to work right, but every reboot, I need another HID to accept the Bluetooth mouse's connection before I can use it.

I tested LibreOffice and one of the large stories I'm writing (140 some odd pages), and it seemed to work quite well, though the auto-save seemed to be about the same speed as Mac OSX 10.4 or slightly slower.

I didn't test much else, but I will have to manually install the driver/firmware for the Airport Extreme card (this is where my strong dislike of Broadcom comes from) before I can connect wirelessly to the internet.

The test I'd really like to run is copying files from an external USB drive over ethernet. I remember doing it with Taiga once, and it turned out kinda horribly, either because OSX's built in FTP isn't made for large transfers, or HFS/HFS+ isn't the best file system to use for an external drive (with OSX, I'm pretty limited to what I can use). I think it's because of HFS/HFS+, since when I plug the external into Mei-chan and copy the files that way, I still have a bit of problems; yesterday I had 1 file miscalculate the MD5 from the external, and two bad copies out of 80-100 some odd files, while that doesn't seem bad, it should be a lot rarer. The only problem with testing it is that the files I'd like to copy to test with are on the HFS/HFS+ external drive, so if I copy to an ext4 external drive, it'd have to be in Debian, since using FUSE is a big no-no because that's just extra, unnecessary CPU work. I suppose I could transfer over ethernet to keep the file systems with their respective OS's (ext4 external with Debian, HFS/HFS+ external with OSX) - I'd just need to set up vsftpd to do that.

I will probably do this project soon, I'm just not sure exactly when. I may also migrate Sae-chan to Debian if things seem to be better that way.

Apple PowerMac G5 2

I reburned Fedora at x1 speed, and still wasn't able to boot from it, then tried the net install version, which worked, up until I had to type in the root (or maybe user) password, where it asked me to double-click "Done" when using a weak password - it froze.

I then looked at the list of PPC-based Linux/Unix distributions, and was left with Debian, Free/Open/Net BSD, Vine, and Descent|OS (there's also RHLE, and T2 SDE, both of did not sound like a good idea).

I've touched Vine Linux once before, but since it's Japanese-only text (from what I saw for screenshots), I decided to steer away from it.

Descent|OS sounded okay, but with MATE as the desktop environment, I decided against it (I remember having problems with Cinnamon and MATE when testing them a long while ago).

Free/Open/Net BSD I decided to put off, since I think the installation was a bit more complicated than most standard distributions (Debian, etc).

Debian is what I was left with, and I was decently sceptical, since I remembered booting to a command line after installing on the netbook I used to have, but I went with it anyway, since I didn't have much option. At first I was going to download the DVD version, but was off-put by the 4-hour download - during which, I was reading through the documentation. I then moved to downloading the three install CDs, since it equated to under 2GB, compared with the full DVD-sized download of roughly 4.6GB. After reading a bit more of the documentation, I found there was the Xfce desktop environment, and a separate CD-sized disk 1 for it, so I stopped the regular disk 1 download and started Xfce disk 1 instead. The documentation also said that I'd need disks 2 and 3 along with it, so I downloaded them.

The initial test installation passed the test, not breaking/freezing at any point. What I found really strange was that the installation never asked for disks 2 or 3, especially when the documentation said it would, but it did install all the necessary items with just Xfce disk 1, so I wasn't that concerned with it.

I tried to used Aptitude to update the system, but it got weird and I had to eventually kill the process, since it didn't seem to be getting me anywhere (the process was running just fine); Synaptic worked just fine, minus the "Quick search" box being missing. After installing, setting up, and testing vsftpd, I began writing some of the necessities down, along with a bit of instructions before I did a reinstallation to write instructions for the installation process. I reinstalled again (I believe) to mimic the actual set up/use and wrote more of the installation.

My best friend needed a podcast recording from me (I forgot to give it to him before I left on Saturday), and I took it all to his place to finish up and whatnot. I ran a mock test, transferring a large amount of files (55 files), with one of them being quite large) from my laptop to the G5 then back to my laptop. I had 4 sets of MD5 sums (the original source, the copy on my laptop from the original source, the copy on the G5, and the copy from the G5) and they all came out the same, meaning that there wasn't any problems during transfer over gigabit LAN; the speeds were also acceptable.

One thing I noticed was that sudo didn't seem to work at all - I actually had to use su instead (as in logging into root in terminal). I suppose I could've tried su -c, but it didn't strike me at the time; plus, with some of the things that I needed to do, it seemed faster to just use su and stay in it.

After 4 days of working with it, I'm satisfied with the results; it also makes me tempted to migrate towards using Debian instead of openSUSE because of the rolling-type distribution, but I probably won't.

openSUSE 13.1/13.2 "Beta 2"

Anyway, after updating packages on Mei-chan yesterday (which included VLC), I was watching a movie, since I didn't feel like doing much at all. I decided to hit the subtitle hot key for VLC since I had previously clicked on the video window, and it changed the setting; I hit the key a couple more times before testing the space key for play/pause. I was quite pleased to see that it was finally fixed (whatever the problem was), since the only other way to fix it was to compile VLC from source code... Which is something I'd like to avoid.

Now I don't have to make sure to click on the controller window whenever I watch something, and it'll save me a lot of hassle if my controller's buried underneath another window and I need to pause whatever I'm watching.

On a different note, it seems like there wasn't ever 13.2 Beta 2... And during my G5 escapades, I snagged RC1, since I realised that I had missed and forgotten about Beta 2 (not knowing then that it never happened). I've done a bit of testing, but still have a bit of testing left, along with taking some screenshots; hopefully I can have the 13.2 RC1 post up by tomorrow evening, since I was busy with the G5.

Finnix and SystemRescueCd

I stumbled upon these as I was looking for PPC-based Linux distributions (well, SystemRescueCd is strictly x86) and decided to give both a whirl. I was hoping to find something that stayed updated with GParted, fast to load, and hasn't any annoying setup options (boots straight to X).

Finnix was fast indeed and had no setup, but the major thing I found was that it's strictly command line. No X to get into to use GParted. I also found this site that told me what I needed to know about Finnix (though the article was on a slightly older version). Needless to say, it was not a viable candidate.

SystemRescueCd uses X and GParted, however, while booting, I saw the textual setup that's in GParted Live, so at the first question (I believe the keyboard map), I ejected the disk and did a hard shutdown. While I can understand the point of SystemRescueCd, I'd rather use GParted Live If I'm going to have to set up the language, keymap, etc. SystemRescueCd is not going to be something I use either.

Since my GParted Live is old (0.17.x vs 0.19.1), I'll have to test it out, but I'm expecting it to be not much different than before with the setup options. At some point, I may spin my own distro where it boots directly into X and opens GParted, just like GParted Live, but without all the annoying setup questions; however, that will be when I learn how to do so... Heck, I may just respin GParted Live to use the default options to make it how I'd like and finally kill off PartedMagic.