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Thread: Live Ubuntu for a Powerbook G4 1.33GHz 12"

  1. #21
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    Re: Live Ubuntu for a Powerbook G4 1.33GHz 12"

    Ok, so following rsavage suggestion and going thru the many steps as explained in the FAQ, I've been able to create a Persistent Live USB Ubuntu 12.04 thing.

    TBH it's probably at least as much luck as it is work (and some reminiscence from my good ole days working in a Unix environment), esp. the section around mkofboot, I've tried to get the most out of reading 20 times the 6-line explanation ^^, gave it a shot à la "oh what the heck let's just try this !", and voilà, now booting directly from USB flash drive, no need to get thru O/F or anything. Nice !

    Next step : RTFM about what "persistence" consists of here, iow what settings can I save - or not save, how it works, etc... and then try it out. Once I have this mastered (lol), I can move on to looking into installing missing drivers, missing plugins, missing applications, missing... ok, enough already !

    Too bad this thread and the PPC forum in general doesn't generate more activity, more responsiveness, oh well... (and thanxx a great deal to those who do participate here)

  2. #22
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    Re: Live Ubuntu for a Powerbook G4 1.33GHz 12"

    Oops - doublon.
    Last edited by peezee13; December 6th, 2012 at 04:42 PM.

  3. #23
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    Re: Live Ubuntu for a Powerbook G4 1.33GHz 12"

    Persistence working fine on my Powerbook, all settings and added packages have been properly saved everything was still there after reboot as expected (in fact this is my first post here from that computer, and first since I could not boot MacOS X from the hard drive anymore).

    Had to add automatic mounting of the separate partition on the USB stick (casper-rw) in the fstab file, otherwise had to do it manually each time. Btw after reboot, in the folder view I do have "casper-rw" listed in the devices section top left pane of the window ( underneath the hard drive - which as I already said is almost dead and unused) with an eject button next to it, however if I click on it I get an error messg "Could not find /cow"...

    Now, after successfully installing the required ubuntu-restricted-extras package, I'm trying to play some MPEG video with MPlayer (Totem) however it doesn't work, when I double click an MPG file it does launch MPlayer however it crashes immediately.

    If I launch Totem from a terminal, I have the following error msg in terminal :

    (totem:4830): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: Read/writable property 'object' on class 'ZeitgeistDpPlugin' has type 'TotemObject' which is not exactly equal to the type 'GObject' of the property on the interface 'PeasActivatable'

    and after loading a movie I immediately get an MPlayer crash and segmentation fault (core dumped) in the terminal.

    Have no idea what this means. Could it be due to the fact that I have to use nouveau.noaccel=1 at yaboot time ? (otherwise display all messed up)

  4. #24
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    Re: Live Ubuntu for a Powerbook G4 1.33GHz 12"

    This is becoming a journal of some sort I guess...

    Anyway, I've found (by coincidence) the existence of a "gnome-mplayer", ran it on my PC in Lubuntu 12.10 via VBox and worked Ok, so installed it on my Powerbook and... works Ok too. So that's good, starting to approach my initial goal...

    Except for the fact that I can't resize the video nor go fullscreen, but for this I highly suspect that the absence of specific NVidia driver in my install (or maybe the nouveau.noaccel=1 switch) is the root cause of this problem, so I'm going to investigate in that direction - which I knew I had to anyway, I want to get rid of the yaboot switch and have full graphics support. Dream on... :-}

    Other issue right now is that the casper-rw partition still refuses to automount at reboot, I have to do it manually in disk utility. I have edited the /etc/fstab but after reboot I see that my edits are gone. Need to fix this as well.

    On a general note, Ubuntu 12.04 has the CPU running high quite often (and its fan gets crazy noisy), from what I've read (and experienced on the PC via VBox) Lubuntu is not as resource heavy, I also find its GUI a bit more intuitive upfront for someone essentially adept at Win7 (and MacOS but far behind ^^). So I might decide to switch to Lubuntu pretty soon.

    Like I needed just that, restart from zero lol... :-]

  5. #25
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    Lubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin

    Re: Live Ubuntu for a Powerbook G4 1.33GHz 12"

    Quote Originally Posted by peezee13 View Post
    This is becoming a journal of some sort I guess...

    Anyway, I've found (by coincidence) the existence of a "gnome-mplayer", ran it on my PC in Lubuntu 12.10 via VBox and worked Ok, so installed it on my Powerbook and... works Ok too. So that's good, starting to approach my initial goal...

    Except for the fact that I can't resize the video nor go fullscreen, but for this I highly suspect that the absence of specific NVidia driver in my install (or maybe the nouveau.noaccel=1 switch) is the root cause of this problem, so I'm going to investigate in that direction - which I knew I had to anyway, I want to get rid of the yaboot switch and have full graphics support. Dream on... :-}

    Other issue right now is that the casper-rw partition still refuses to automount at reboot, I have to do it manually in disk utility. I have edited the /etc/fstab but after reboot I see that my edits are gone. Need to fix this as well.

    On a general note, Ubuntu 12.04 has the CPU running high quite often (and its fan gets crazy noisy), from what I've read (and experienced on the PC via VBox) Lubuntu is not as resource heavy, I also find its GUI a bit more intuitive upfront for someone essentially adept at Win7 (and MacOS but far behind ^^). So I might decide to switch to Lubuntu pretty soon.

    Like I needed just that, restart from zero lol... :-]
    Lubuntu is snappier than Ubuntu and the design is lighter some
    CPU havy stuff is removed (software handler )

    1. you wrote TORAM=yes in my world i use toram its works for 1.5 GB RAM
    but you can use it with lower RAM if you use swap (i tried 768 MB with swap its more snappier with firefox etc

    2.you can change swappiness to 1 - 10 (default is 60 )

    3.gnome-mplayer if you use nv/aty128fb driver in your other mac does it work then

    4.you can resize the iso be smaller too (less size on USB )

    5.how do you feel the performance

    6.how long is boot time from power on to desktop

    when you ready
    write a how to i think more people can try this solution

    god Thread

  6. #26
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    Re: Live Ubuntu for a Powerbook G4 1.33GHz 12"

    Hallå abtabt, (nice country Sweden, loved it in Stockholm - except for the beer price ^^)

    concerning the "toram" thing, I'm reading this article : https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BootToRAM and now realize I had a rather naive approach to the problem (thinking that simply adding a "toram" switch in the boot command line would make Ubuntu operate from RAM, simple as that - NOT ! ^^).

    So I obviously need to do some more thinking here; I'll take some of your advices like creating a "light" version of Ubuntu, eg I do not need OpenOffice in the install, and I can probably strip off other unnecessary stuff from the Distro to make it as lean as possible. In terms of distro, if I have to go thru that level of customization then it make full sense to switch to the lighter Lubuntu right away instead of spending more time on Ubuntu.

    How do you change the "swapiness" ?

    In terms of boot time we're talking several minutes on my Powerbook, this is quite long. which is also why I need to have "suspend" mode fully working at some point. Unfortunately I'm afraid this is just a pipe dream, considering the problems I'm having with the graphics driver (not to mention Wifi, I haven't even started to work on this issue). But we'll see, one step at a time...

  7. #27
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    Lubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin

    Re: Live Ubuntu for a Powerbook G4 1.33GHz 12"

    Quote Originally Posted by peezee13 View Post
    Hallå abtabt, (nice country Sweden, loved it in Stockholm - except for the beer price ^^)

    concerning the "toram" thing, I'm reading this article : https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BootToRAM and now realize I had a rather naive approach to the problem (thinking that simply adding a "toram" switch in the boot command line would make Ubuntu operate from RAM, simple as that - NOT ! ^^).

    So I obviously need to do some more thinking here; I'll take some of your advices like creating a "light" version of Ubuntu, eg I do not need OpenOffice in the install, and I can probably strip off other unnecessary stuff from the Distro to make it as lean as possible. In terms of distro, if I have to go thru that level of customization then it make full sense to switch to the lighter Lubuntu right away instead of spending more time on Ubuntu.

    How do you change the "swapiness" ?

    In terms of boot time we're talking several minutes on my Powerbook, this is quite long. which is also why I need to have "suspend" mode fully working at some point. Unfortunately I'm afraid this is just a pipe dream, considering the problems I'm having with the graphics driver (not to mention Wifi, I haven't even started to work on this issue). But we'll see, one step at a time...
    yes the beer is too expensive (but people go to Danmark or Deutchland )to buy sheep beer and buse but not me i dont like
    old beer i like fresh beer for pleasure and old fashion LP
    with god music


    didn't this thread work (suspend)
    http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2090462

    i put info in the thread about swap

    i hope you dont give up about USB

    (i use USB/SD card in pc world with good performance with out any harddrive )


  8. #28
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    Nov 2012
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    Re: Live Ubuntu for a Powerbook G4 1.33GHz 12"

    Thanxx, I'll have a look at that thread.

    I need to keep in mind that once booted to RAM any change made in the configuration, any new software installed will be lost at next reboot. At least that's what I understand from reading the BootToRAM page. IOW, Persistent and ToRam are kind of mutually exclusive.

    I guess then that I'll need to have a fully operating Live Ubuntu (built over time, booting in Persistent mode to save changes) before wanting to switch to a ToRam boot, which only make sense if you don't want/have to modify your install.

    I wonder though whether or not it would be possible to add a symbolic link in /usr/bin pointing to a folder in the USB "user partition" (created when building the Persistent Live USB install), such that even when booting to RAM it would be possible to add programs/software...

    Also, from what I see, although Ubuntu is said to be more resource consuming than Lubuntu, the latter's distro is 715M (12.04) and no Open Office to strip off, while the Ubuntu distro is 652M and does include Open Office that I could then remove from it...

    So, what is there in Lubuntu that I could remove to make the distro smaller, such that it could fit in my 768MB RAM Powerbook (including swap)...?
    Powerbook G4 Alu - 1.33GHz proc. 768MB RAM NVidia chipset - HDD dead - Working on Persistent Live USB stick (L)Ubuntu 12.04 install

  9. #29
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    Re: Live Ubuntu for a Powerbook G4 1.33GHz 12"

    Ok, let's forget about the toram for now, not a showstopper, more like a potential enhancement once everything's running as it should.

    Because of the limitations I have in playing video media (eg impossible to play *full screen* video), I'm now concentrating on the NVidia graphics chipset issue. Well, I _believe_ the nouveau.noaccel=1 switch is the cause of these limitations, but I'm not sure, no one yet has come here to confirm this - but let's assume for now it to be the case.


    EDITH : I just played around with gnome-mplayer preferences, and found out there is one mode called "vdpau" which does play the video in full screen, however it's so CPU intensive that it's more like a slide show than a movie, like 4 sec per frame lol. Resizing does work as well. However if I enable video hardware support, the movie doesn't play at all.

    Not sure how to interpret this... I wish an "expert" will land here and be kind enough to provide his/her help to get around this (which is a killer issue for me).
    Last edited by peezee13; December 8th, 2012 at 02:37 AM.
    Powerbook G4 Alu - 1.33GHz proc. 768MB RAM NVidia chipset - HDD dead - Working on Persistent Live USB stick (L)Ubuntu 12.04 install

  10. #30
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    Re: Live Ubuntu for a Powerbook G4 1.33GHz 12"

    So have tried various yaboot switches to see if things would improve, most notably this: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...38&postcount=5, which brought me back to the "psychedelic" colours I had last week, pretty ugly but still allowed me to try mplayer, and in the end no change, still impossible to go fullscreen with gnome mplayer (actually a little worse, not even vdpau is able to go FS in that video mode).

    So... doesn't look like the noaccel=1 switch (which remember allows me to actually use Ubuntu, pretty mandatory at this point) is what's causing the full screen/resize issue. Well, at least that's my conclusion, but no guarantee.

    Well, on to doing more research I'm afraid...


    Yet another Edith (Piaf) : finally, found a solution for this, MPlayer needs to be told that it's Ok to resize or go full screen (!?!), by adding "zoom=yes" to its config file (in the .mplayer dir under home folder). So now resize and FS work in normal video mode, however when in FS due to CPU at 100% the video goes to a sort of slow motion, sound continues to play but not in sync as you can imagine.

    Looks like I'm not going to get what I was looking for with Live Ubuntu on my jig... :-/
    Last edited by peezee13; December 8th, 2012 at 03:31 AM.
    Powerbook G4 Alu - 1.33GHz proc. 768MB RAM NVidia chipset - HDD dead - Working on Persistent Live USB stick (L)Ubuntu 12.04 install

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