Jessie meets BigMac


UPDATE 7/5/2015 - I referenced the improper SMP kernel for G5 machines.  This has been corrected.

UPDATE 2 7/18/2015 - Added section for resolving high RPMs from the G5's fans.

As almost all of us know, Debian's latest stable release, Jessie, went live this past month.  I debated whether I would do an in place upgrade using apt-get or if I would just start from scratch with a fresh new install on my dual-core G5.  The latter option won for a couple of reasons, the biggest being that I wanted to see what worked and didn't work right out of the gate with this latest release.

The install was straightforward and almost identical to the installer for Wheezy with one major noticeable difference. The Jessie installer will give you the option to select your preferred desktop environment you would like installed. Of course, the ability to add in the necessary yaboot parameters for indicating your preferred desktop environment when running the installer have existed previously and still do, but it is a nice change for those not quite as technically minded.  Personally, I prefer LXDE, so I went with that.  If you like to live on the edge, go ahead and select more than one. Otherwise, everything else again, is almost identical.

One other thing to keep in mind if installing this on a G5 PowerMac is that you will want to make sure you are installing the 64-bit version of Jessie as well as installing the SMP (symmetric multi-processor) kernel so that it can take advantage of either your multiple CPUs or cores.  Just to put your mind at ease if you are still unsure, every model of G5 is 64-bit capable. Jessie would run on the non-SMP kernel, but only one core/CPU would be utilized. However, if you just load the installer up with the defaults you shouldn't really even need to worry about these two things.  If you've already installed Jessie and want to make sure you are running the system with both of these features run the following command:
uname -a

You should get something similar to the following with both SMP and ppc64 included in the results:
Linux BigMac 3.16.0-4-powerpc64 #1 SMP Debian 3.16.7-ckt9-3~deb8u1 (2015-04-24) ppc64 GNU/Linux

If for some reason, the SMP kernel was not installed, you can still install and enable it by installing the linux-image-3.16.0-4-powerpc-smp linux-image-3.16.0-4-powerpc64 package along with its headers and other dependencies.  You can substitute the appropriate image version for your system if different from what I have above.

While on the topic of installation, if you are new to Debian/Linux and/or Debian on PPC, I would encourage you to read through the install guide found here. I consider myself very well versed and experienced when it comes to working with Linux, but this guide taught me many things I previously did not know or never really fully understood.   The guide is available in several formats, so feel free to use your preferred choice. There are still many hyper-links I'd like to follow within that guide to further my knowledge and understanding of Debian/Linux and running it on the PPC architecture.

Once the install was complete, I rebooted to the login screen and was greeted with screwy looking and unusable results.  In regards to graphics, keep in mind that I have a flashed nVidia Quadro 4500 FX card so I'm free from the Radeon/KMS madness, but that's not to say noveau has several issues of its own. After just a tiny bit of reading on the PowerPCKnownIssues page, I learned I would likely have to disable hardware acceleration for things to work. By the way, I would definitely check out that page as well regardless as it covers many if not all issues affecting PowerPC users and most of it pertains to Debian installs as well.

So in my yaboot.conf I added the following line after the initrd line of my main Linux image and ran sudo ybin -v afterwards:
append="nouveau.noaccel=1"

I was then able to reboot in a working desktop environment. Despite the lack of 3D acceleration, the software rasterized graphics felt incredibly fluid (especially after installing and running compton) with still plenty of CPU cycles still leftover for a plethora of other tasks. Running glxgears givings me on average only about 116 FPS, which I know the nVidia card could crush if it could be put to use with 3D acceleration.

On the same graphics front, I have not yet been able to enable both of my 20" Apple Cinema displays so right now they are mirroring each other (the default behavior). I went ahead and installed arandr (a GUI-wrapper to xrandr) to try and enable both monitors, but each time I try to apply the changes after positioning the displays in the desired fashion, I'm logged out of my desktop session. So at this point, that aspect is still ongoing project.

Of course, I still had to install the necessary firmware for the G5's Airport card, but info on installing it can be found on the Ubuntu PowerPC FAQ page.  Another piece of hardware that was not working off the bat was sound, but running alsamixer and hitting the 'M' key to un-mute the Master Volume took care of that.  My 5 USB port Sonnet PCI card worked from the get go, but I have not yet tested connectivity with the Sonnet E4i card and G5 Jive, but will post results once I have done so.

Lastly, in regards to any issues up front with installation, a few have reported uncontrollable fans revving up to max RPMs.  If you happen to be one of these unlucky few, run the following command to load the necessary module that controls fan speed.

sudo modprobe i2c-powermac


If that resolves the issue, be sure to add these modules to /etc/modules so it is loaded at startup.

Other than that, I'm still in the process of customization, but for the most part have not ran into anything else unusual or come across any other unknown and unreported bugs.  Overall, apart from the no 3D acceleration, I'm quite impressed and look forward to using it daily on as one my main workhorses. In regards to graphics, I have not lost faith that some day in the future I will once again have 3D acceleration.  I was reading it possible get 3D acceleration back by compiling and installing an updated version of the nouveau driver.  I see that as quite a hill to climb, but at the same time I view this as another opportunity to learn and expand my knowledge of computing.  As has been said here and on many Linux forum posts all over the web, Linux is not for the faint of heart.

Here is a screen shot showing a few running applications. Notice the video I somehow randomly stumbled upon while putting together this post.


If you have a G5 you've recently installed Jessie on, feel free to share your experiences, bugs, or fixes in the comments below. If I discover anything else that could be useful or helpful when doing an install on a G5 I'll update this post unless the fix and/or info warrants an individual post.  Also, just know I'd be glad to help anybody who runs into any other issues with Jessie on their G5.

21 comments:

  1. Great post, B-rock. Very well thought out and detailed.

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  2. Thanks zen. I was glad to finally have a bit of time yesterday to finish writing this up. Hopefully it's helpful to other G5 owners out there in some small way.

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  3. Have you tried getting hardware acceleration on you nvidia card?

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    1. Not yet, but the plan is to try and compile the latest nouveau driver myself as hardware accleration with the current driver is out of the question. That will likely be a separate post.

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  4. I gave a try on my dualcore G5 (w/ GeForce 6600LE) but all I got was a blue & black lines pattern right after dvd detection. Same with Wheezy 7.8 btw.

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    1. Have you tried adding any yaboot parameters when booting the installation CD/DVD such as "live video=ofonly nouveau.modeset=0" to see if that makes any difference? I might have that same graphics card laying around. I'll give it a shot myself and see what happens.

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    2. Well, it doesn't even get to yaboot.

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    3. You mentioned that you get blue and black lines right after the DVD detection, which I assumed was the DVD detection part of the Debian installer. Is that correct or do you mean something else?

      Does the system boot from other install media such as an OS X DVD?

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    4. Yes, it does. Actually every Linux distribution I tried leads to this problem right after openfirmware, so I assume it is a yaboot issue with GF6600LE.
      Pity I don't have an ATI card in handy to give it a try.

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  5. I installed Jessie 64 bit on my single 1.6ghz G5 with Radeon 9800. Everything went very smoothly, but it's good to have this advice incase I ever get an Nvidia card. Thanks!

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    1. Thanks for the feedback. Glad to hear things went well video card-wise with the installation of Jessie. In the near future I would like to try and use a Radeon HD video card in my G5 as reported by luigiburdo here.

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  6. Finally a detailed Linux post for G5s. This is probably the biggest void among PowerPC bloggers. There's a lot of information but it's scattered around different forums and mailing lists, so it's great to get it all in one place.

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    1. Thanks Dan. I'll agree that it is nice. Hopefully it can be refined over time as needed.

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  7. A question. What do you feel would be the best video card by any company for a G5 with Linux?

    Thanks

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    1. I will let B-rock have the call on that, as he is the G5 user, but as a rule, on all architectures; Linux plays a lot better with ATI/AMD.

      Nvidia has never been nearly as big a player in the open source world, and so the drivers are typically lacking, if not nonexistent.

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    2. In this case, I'm going to have to agree with Zen. Typically, ATI/AMD has much better support and success especially right out the box. The nouveau driver is completely hit or miss. It was working great in Wheezy, but it's proving to be quite a feat to get working in an efficient manner on Jessie. Still working on getting 3D acceleration going with the latest nouveau driver and an updated kernel.

      The nv driver for Nvidia cards is very much outdated and offers little in terms of utilizing the power your graphics card has to offer. And if you don't use the nv driver, you'll fall back to fbdev, which also does not fully utilize your graphics card either, but does provide decent performance with the software rasterizer. Again, if you have a beefy video card though, what's the point of using just the software rasterizer?

      Plan on seeing articles in the future about different video cards with Jessie, their successes, their failures, and last not but not least performance. Hopefully with those experiences, I'll be better able to provide a more accurate response to your original question.

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  8. Top notch post B-Rock! It really helped with my iMac G5.

    I had to append nouveau.noaccel=1 as well. My iMac is the1.6ghz model with a Nvidia FX5200. Before I go any further with the graphics I want to figure out how to calm the fans down. They all currently and constantly run at 5000+ rpms.

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    1. Thanks Mark! In regards to your fan control issue, I've read in the past that adding windfarm_core to your /etc/modules file should help alleviate this issue.

      Of course, you can also just run "modprobe windfarm_core" to see if the correct module loads and resolves the issue without rebooting first.

      Just a thought though. If that is the case, I'll go ahead and it to the install notes for this post.

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  9. Thanks for this! It's the best write-out on this issue I've read so far.

    I'm returning to Wheezy, though. I can't do without graphics acceleration for now

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    1. Thank you for the kind words. I can totally understand your reasoning. I'm doing what I can to help return 3D acceleration to us Nvidia/nouveua users. Stay tuned.

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  10. I've been working for the better part of the last two days trying to get this working on a single 1.8 ghz g5. I've still had no luck. Anyone else run into this problem?

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