Slackware PPC
adam
I've got an Apple G3 466 laptop, and I've been running linux on it.
The only distrib I could find for mac was LinuxPPC, which is esentially
RedHat. That had to go. So, I installed the most minimal LinuxPPC
packages, swapped out the /etc/inittab and rc.d folder for a slackware
7.1 distrib set (you have to adjust baud rates on the tty spawning in
rc.S and make a symlink to 'getty' called 'agetty' to make it work at
first) and then downloaded the slackware-current sources and started
building the d1 packages.
After much source configuration and many builds I have finished the
sources for all of the disk sets, and have what I consider to be a
Slackware iBook, loading my 2.4.5 kernel with the old "yaBoot" software
this RedHat distrib was using. The performance of all the software I've
been running has been very impressive on the little 64-bit risc proc,
astonishingly faster under linux than OS X (which I recommend to
nobody!!!). We're talking the same apps, in console mode or under
XFree86, not Aqua. To tell the truth, it's even a little quicker than my
Athlon 550, also running Slackware.
So that got me thinking . . . anybody want to help me create an actual
G3/G4 powerpc Slackware (or slackware-like) distribution? Many
disappointed OS X users I know would be excited to hear of such a thing.
- Adam
Jurgen Philippaerts
> So that got me thinking . . . anybody want to help me create an actual
> G3/G4 powerpc Slackware (or slackware-like) distribution? Many
> disappointed OS X users I know would be excited to hear of such a thing.
i don't have any mac, but i guess you'd make many people happy if you
could get slack ported to that platform.
you may try posting your question in the forum on slackware.com
good luck,
Jurgen.
Allen Wong
> Hey.
> I've got an Apple G3 466 laptop, and I've been running linux on it.
> The only distrib I could find for mac was LinuxPPC, which is esentially
> RedHat. That had to go. So, I installed the most minimal LinuxPPC
> packages, swapped out the /etc/inittab and rc.d folder for a slackware
<snip>
Hey! You stole my idea! :)
I installed Debian on my iMac but haven't gotten around to actually porting the
Slack packages yet.
<snip>
> So that got me thinking . . . anybody want to help me create an actual
> G3/G4 powerpc Slackware (or slackware-like) distribution? Many
> disappointed OS X users I know would be excited to hear of such a thing.
Actually, there is a PPC port. Logan Johnson is working on it. Unfortunately,
the installer's broken as is a few other things. And considering the current
situation with Slackware, I'm not sure if it will be released. :(
Allen
--
Slackware: Have you cursed at a configuration file today?
7:00am up 2 days, 11:15, 7 users, load average: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00
adam
> Actually, there is a PPC port. Logan Johnson is working on it. Unfortunately,
> the installer's broken as is a few other things. And considering the current
> situation with Slackware, I'm not sure if it will be released. :(
Yeah, I saw my biggest obsticle devising an installer that would work on
any "new world" Apple system.
I figured if I could make an HFS cdrom with yaBoot in its "System
Folder" and a kernel (maybe even a vanil Slackware 2.2.16 but recompiled
for ppc) with a ramdisk image of a filesystem from a (again recompiled)
Slackware rootdisk. I could mostly gank the code from the PC installer
and just replace the tgz files in the distrib with my own which would
happen to be built for ppc. One would have to fix a bunch of stuff . . .
like LILO is kindof a moot point . . . but, then again, Logan Johnson is
prolly a lot smarter than I and would have alrady thought of all that
and something better, and just 'cause I got it working on one box
doesn't mean I can make a distrib for it, even on the relatively static
hardware of different mac systems.
- Adam