Question regarding Fedora / PPC support

[Christopher M. Smith]

I am looking to get involved with helping to test / possibly
assist in rolling out Fedora releases on PPC based hardware. In
looking around there does not appear to be ISOs of the current
content of Rawhide for installing.

I know that this is not really the best list to ask this on,
but most of the users who are on the fedora-***@redhat.com
mailing list aren't really doing this, and to this point haven't
been able to give me any pointers. I guess my questions thus far
are:

1. What are people who are testing / developing for PPC based
hardware doing to bootstrap an installation of Fedora?
2. Are there any documents out there right now that discuss this?
if not, I'd be more than happy to throw some together once I have
got this worked out.

Thanks for your time!

Kind Regards,
CMS

[Bill Nottingham]

Post by Christopher M. Smith
1. What are people who are testing / developing for PPC based
hardware doing to bootstrap an installation of Fedora?

To get a PPC tree you need, basically:

a) a kernel

Then you can build a tree, it should more-or-less work.

Bill

[Dennis Gilmore]

Once upon a time at band camp Wed, 12 Nov 2003 11:58 am, Christopher M. Smith

Post by Christopher M. Smith
1. What are people who are testing / developing for PPC based
hardware doing to bootstrap an installation of Fedora?
2. Are there any documents out there right now that discuss this?
if not, I'd be more than happy to throw some together once I have
got this worked out.

i have a mostly fedora machine on a Powerbook i started with a yellowdog 3
installand set yum to point to rawhide there is a few packages that you will
need to keep the yellowdog versions of there was a discussion on this on the
beta list do a google on it and it will help you on your way.

Dennis

[Paul Nasrat]

Post by Christopher M. Smith
1. What are people who are testing / developing for PPC based
hardware doing to bootstrap an installation of Fedora?

Currently there have been two different approaches - install YDL (3.0.1
iso's hitting mirrors) and yum up to rawhide. Or what I did which was
to install fedora into a clean chroot from a minimal environment. There
are a few gotchas to a full fedora tree working - mainly missing
packages (mac specific stuff such as pdisk, pmac-utils), a broken
depends (ppc64-utils for mkinitrd) and fedora-release. As Bill
mentioned as far as an anaconda build goes the kernel is the big issue.
I've built the boot.iso using anaconda, but not managed to test yet.

Other main issue is a mozilla optimisation issue on ppc - needs to be
built with -O0 - oneline spec change. There are also a set of OOo
patches. Check through fedora-test-list and fedora-devel-list archives
for ppc.

Post by Christopher M. Smith
2. Are there any documents out there right now that discuss this?
if not, I'd be more than happy to throw some together once I have
got this worked out.

No there aren't. However Dan Burcaw from TerraSoft has a set of patches
which he's going to publish - they probably will correspond to what I
and others have done manually.

Other than that all the work is already in anaconda and rawhide is built
for ppc. The main other thing is configuration - ensuring
redhat-config-xfree86 sets up correctly.

Btw I'm using a g3 ibook2. Others have access to meatier equipment.
I'd be intrested in looking at the 64/32 bit environment as I believe
the amd64 people have found some intresting annoyances with hybrid
environments so there is some clean up to do (should ppc64-utils
requires 64 bit libc, etc).

Dan has kindly setup a list which is quiet atm, but an attempt to
collate those contributing rather than fragmented efforts:

http://lists.ydl.net/mailman/listinfo/fedora-ppc

Paul