Testers needed for PowerPC 12.04

[MisterGaribaldi]

Alright, so I'm finally booting the thing via CD (actually, DVD+RW) on my 1.43GHz Mac mini. Will post further as the situation warrants.

EDIT: Ok, so it's been booted successfully. It found my Apple Magic Mouse and, after I found the pairing code for it (and tried inputting it a couple times) it finally paired. Tracking was waaaaaaaaaaaay too fast, so I had to move the acceleration and sensitivity sliders around and then back down to get a reasonable setting.

No out-of-box support for the older Apple Airport Extreme B/G card, which to me at this point is something of a surprise. Fortunately, I was able to scrounge up another router, link it to my Gateway as a WiFi/eNet bridge, and I was able to get on the Internet pretty much immediately.

Opened up the various LibreOffice apps, and they all work as expected.

Other than that, no complaints for a quick driving test on my older Mac.

[rsavage]

Any problems with gedit or nautilus https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...us/+bug/945097 ?

[MisterGaribaldi]

Hmm... What is the default file manager for Gnome 3? If it's Nautilus, then it worked. If not, then I don't know. As for Gedit, I didn't try that, so I can't answer.

One problem, though, is that after booting with the LiveCD and then rebooting into Mac OS X, something happened, causing Leopard to have to do a significant scan-and-repair of my HDD. I got to sit and stare at a blank blue screen for quite a while. Fortunately, it was able to fix whatever it needed to and all is back and running properly.

This leaves me with a bit of a concern, of course. LiveCDs shouldn't be touching your present filesystem, so what did this one do?

[rsavage]

Have you raised your concerns in a bug?

The live cd uses any existing swap partitions ( http://askubuntu.com/questions/8626/...swap-partition ) so that could be a reason why it is accessing your hard drive. Is it identifying a partition as swap when it shouldn't be?

[rsavage]

For those running the Live session testcase I've added a bit about USB persistence to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCFAQ#H...a_USB_drive.3F

All the bugs I've raised are here https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCKnown...ecise_Pangolin . Please confirm them and link them to any testcases you run.

[aq3e]

I was shocked to find an updated version for PPC,About to test 12.04 on PB 17 1.67ghz.

[aq3e]

No dice booting 12.04 LTS

Disk starts to boot yet hangs on the load screen with the version number. Allowed about 15 minutes to see if anything would happen but nothing did. No idea what to do specs are as followed.


Powerbook G4 17

1.67ghz
2.00 GB DDR2
120 GB HD


any ideas?

[nyoli]

i'd like to become tester.
already installed 12.04 on my G5 PowerPC and it works, except sound.
its a bit slow on gnome with or without 2D effects, but fluxbox runs quite nice. (enough for me)

anyways, whats next? how can i participate and improve PPC ubuntu?

[ikkeT]

Hi,

thanks for the effor to make old macs usable. I have used 12.04 on my powerbook g4 17" with radeon for couple of months now. It sucks, to be honest. Luckily I found this thread couple of days ago. Things that bother me:

1. Keymap is messed up, no altgr and special characters are not in the right place
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ig/+bug/796864
2. tty's don't work, like described in this thread. I need to try removing KMS
3. gnome-terminal lost ability to move cursor backwards some days ago:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=673697
4. suspend doesn't work, I need to try the tricks in this thread, removing KMS.
5. No 3d. OsX looks good with all the effects on the mac, but ubuntu is not able
to use 3d. I assume it's again the same radeon fb that would fix it. Need to try.

I need to find time to try to fix this, thanks for the people in the thread and behind the ppc faq&all!

[rsavage]

If you want lots of 3d effects then I recommend 10.04 ubuntu. Basic shadows and stuff you can get in xubuntu 12.04 too. For speed try lubuntu.

You don't have KMS on in 12.04 so you don't have to turn it off. Loading the radeonfb module won't solve your hardware accelerated 3d. Without KMS you have to install an old version of mesa https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...sa/+bug/946677 . However, you'll probably find you need the extra features provided by KMS for the 3d effects in Ubuntu 12.04. Unfortunately, I can only get KMS to work by forcing PCI mode which is not fast enough.

Loading radeonfb will fix your suspend and ttys though (you can add yourself to the bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ux/+bug/949288 ).

Your problem with gnome-terminal is, I think, the same as gedit and nautilus (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s....0/+bug/961512 ).