ppc Linux on the PowerMac G5

With Apple’s abandonment of PPC as of Snow Leopard, I began wondering what to do with the old PowerMac. It’s annoying that so (comparatively) recent a piece of equipment should be given up by its manufacturer, but that’s a rant for another day. Yes, we can still run Leopard until it goes out of support, but with S and I both on MacBook Pros with current OS I know that we would both become frustrated with a widening functionality gap between the systems.

I had always resisted runing Linux on the PowerMac, thinking that the last thing I needed was yet another Linux box in the house. I had tried a couple of times, but it was in the early days of support for the liquid cooling system in the dual-2.5Ghz model and those attempts failed dismally. I figured that by now those issues would be resolved and I would have a much better time.

I assumed that Yellow Dog was still the ‘benchmark’ PPC Linux distro, so I went to their site. I saw a lot of data there about PS3 and Cell; it seems that YDL is transitioning to the cluster and/or research market by focussing on Cell.

The next thing I discovered is the lack of distributions that have a PPC version, even as a secondary platform. My old standby Gentoo still supports PPC, as does Fedora (I think: I saw a reference to downloading a PPC install disk, bit didn’t follow it), but every other major distro has dropped it — openSUSE, for example, with their very latest release (their download page still has a picture of a disc labelled “ppc”, but no such download exists, oops). I guess that since the major producer of desktop PPC systems stopped doing so, the distros saw their potential install base disappear. Unfortunately for those distros, I can see the reverse happening: now that Apple has fully left PPC behind, plenty of folks like me who have moderately recent G4 and G5 hardware and who still want to run a current OS will come to Linux looking for an alternative… I guess time will tell who is right on this one.

So I went to install Gentoo, and to cut a long story short I had exactly the same problem as before: critical temperature condition leading to emergency system power-off. I found that if I capped the CPU speed to 2Ghz I could stay up long enough to get things built, but then the system refused to boot because it couldn’t find the root filesystem. Probably something to do with yaboot, SATA drives and OpenFirmware. So again I’m putting it aside.

My next plan was to treat it as a file server. Surely a BSD would support my G5 hardware: after all, Mac OS X is BSD at heart… Well, no. FreeBSD has no support for SATA on ppc, OpenBSD specifically mentioned liquid-cooled G5s as having no support, and I don’t think I saw any ppc support on NetBSD more recent than G3 [1].

This is one of the things that annoys me about the computer industry: that somehow it’s okay to so completely disregard your older releases. What if the automotive industry worked that way?

So I may yet try Fedora, or give the game away for another year or so and see what the situation looks like then.

[1] I may have mixed up a couple of these details.

Edit: Gentoo’s yaboot has managed to make it so that I can’t boot Mac OS X on the machine any more.  Oh dear.