Resolved Lubuntu 16.04 Boot Error (Solution Within)

[z970]

So I put my Live CD in, type "live-powerpc64" when at the Yaboot screen (I'm doing this on a G5), fire up GParted, and set 2 MB assigned to the bootstrap partition (hfs, sda2), 927 GB to the main os partition (ext4, sda3), and 4608 MB/4.50 GB to the swap partition (swap, sda4), because I have 4.5 GB of RAM.

Then, I get into the installer. And then when it comes to the point where it gives you the option between an automatic format and a manual format, I choose the "Something Else" option (manual formatting). I format the bootstrap partition to NewWorld Boot, put the main partition into Ext4 Journaling, and the swap space to linux-swap, and hit "Install". There are a couple internal errors during the installation (one of them had something to do with WebKit), but it mostly goes well. It finishes, ejects the disc, reboots, and comes into Yaboot.

I press "l" to choose GNU/Linux, press enter at the next prompt, have that grey screen for a second where it confirms the display is working OK (which it passed), then I get this.

I apologize for the low quality, all I had was an iPod touch 4.

Could someone please help me with this issue? I was really looking forward to having Lubuntu drive my G5.

Much appreciated.

 

[AphoticD]

I would try a reinstall using the default "automatic format" option, then make a copy of the yaboot.conf to see how the bootloader is assigning OF drive paths. You could always reboot to the installer and use gparted to resize partition sizes as needed.

I have previously had the same kind of problem with yaboot after installation of MATE and found it a good idea to have a Tiger boot partition (or small HDD) which can mount the bootstrap HFS partition then you can use Mac OS X Terminal or TextEdit to manually edit yaboot.conf as well as interacting with the nvram tool for manually setting the boot device. You can have the best of both worlds and run Tiger in MOL/KVM (in an X window) once you've got your Linux desktop up and running.

 

[z970]

I would try a reinstall using the default "automatic format" option, then make a copy of the yaboot.conf to see how the bootloader is assigning OF drive paths. You could always reboot to the installer and use gparted to resize partition sizes as needed.

I have previously had the same kind of problem with yaboot after installation of MATE and found it a good idea to have a Tiger boot partition (or small HDD) which can mount the bootstrap HFS partition then you can use Mac OS X Terminal or TextEdit to manually edit yaboot.conf as well as interacting with the nvram tool for manually setting the boot device. You can have the best of both worlds and run Tiger in MOL/KVM (in an X window) once you've got your Linux desktop up and running.

I tried the automatic format option, too. It got me to the exact same place.

Now that I review it, from what I can understand from the picture above, it's likely to be an issue with mounting the main Ext4 partition.

I'm just wondering if anyone can point me anywhere with that. I'd be very grateful.

 

[0248294]

What's the hard drive setup? Do you have one single drive, or two? In case of two, what OS is on which hard drive? And in case of one hard drive, are you only installing Lubuntu, or are you dualbooting? I have had the same issues with Ubuntu MATE before, so I know how to fix it if you're in the same position as me hard drive wise.

 

[z970]

What's the hard drive setup? Do you have one single drive, or two? In case of two, what OS is on which hard drive? And in case of one hard drive, are you only installing Lubuntu, or are you dualbooting? I have had the same issues with Ubuntu MATE before, so I know how to fix it if you're in the same position as me hard drive wise.

I've got two drives. The first one is the one I'm trying to get Lubuntu on. Nothing else, no other HFS+ partitions, just Lubuntu.

The second one I've got Leopard on, and if it makes any difference, the first one has a jumper in it to set it to 'master' mode, so the second one is in slave mode.

Thanks for the help, people.

 

[AphoticD]

Yes, I recall this happening with one of my G5s, I can't remember which (maybe a 7,2?). The installer somehow switched between HDD device 1 and 0 in the yaboot config.

Easy fix: if your Linux HDD is in position A (in the tower) move it to position B or vice versa.

The alternative is to edit the yaboot.conf and change the SATA bus OF path from 0 to 1 or vice versa.

 

[0248294]

Unplug the second drive, install Lubuntu, and see if it boots then. It's unfortunately the only way I have personally gotten it to work, it's able to still dual boot if you reconnect the secondary Leopard drive after Lubuntu has finished installing, and hold Option (or Alt on a Windows keyboard) on boot to go to the boot selection menu, but that screen takes a while to load which slows down booting tremendously. I'm still working out how to fix that.

 

[AphoticD]

Unplug the second drive, install Lubuntu, and see if it boots then. It's unfortunately the only way I have personally gotten it to work, it's able to still dual boot if you reconnect the secondary Leopard drive after Lubuntu has finished installing, and hold Option (or Alt on a Windows keyboard) on boot to go to the boot selection menu, but that screen takes a while to load which slows down booting tremendously. I'm still working out how to fix that.

You'll want to manually set the boot-device in Open Firmware (or use the nvram tool in either OSX or Linux) to point to the bootstrap HFS partition, you'll then get your yaboot menu, (i.e "press l, m, x" to select your OS)

 

[0248294]

You'll want to manually set the boot-device in Open Firmware (or use the nvram tool in either OSX or Linux) to point to the bootstrap HFS partition, you'll then get your yaboot menu, (i.e "press l, m, x" to select your OS)

Oh, it did, but either selecting X or L just caused it to fail at boot. L caused the exact issue @z970mp is having, X just caused it to hang on a grey screen. So in both cases, Yaboot seems to fail to properly boot the desired OS. Which is something I still need to work out.

 

[z970]

Question, where exactly in yaboot.conf is the setting for the SATA OF path? I see a "/ht@0" and a "ffffffffffffffff/@0". Which one of them do I change to 1?

 

[AphoticD]

Question, where exactly in yaboot.conf is the setting for the SATA OF path? I see a "/ht@0" and a "ffffffffffffffff/@0". Which one of them do I change to 1?

I think the 1st is the bus and the 2nd is the device.

No harm in trying either until it works.

You can always change the startup disk in Mac OS X and then check the output of nvram for the boot-device, this will show you which disk or bus your Mac OS X is on, then go from there
[doublepost=1505616784][/doublepost]

Oh, it did, but either selecting X or L just caused it to fail at boot. L caused the exact issue @z970mp is having, X just caused it to hang on a grey screen. So in both cases, Yaboot seems to fail to properly boot the desired OS. Which is something I still need to work out.

Yaboot.conf must be pointing to the wrong boot volume. You can manually edit the yaboot.conf by mounting the hfs bootstrap partition in OSX. Check the OF paths are correct as per @z970mp's issue.

 

[z970]

I changed ht@0 to ht@1, attempted to save and overwrite, and it threw me an error saying "Can't open file to write." I used Leafpad.

What is going on?! This stupid OS (so far) can't stop throwing errors at me! Damn it, what's the problem now??

 

[AphoticD]

You need root permission. Try with sudo

 

[z970]

You need root permission. Try with sudo

How do I try with sudo?

 

[AphoticD]

Bring up the Terminal (or xterm) application and then something like:

sudo leafpad /path/to/yaboot.conf

Or you can do the edit at the terminal with pico or vi, e.g

sudo pico /path/to/yaboot.conf

(Replacing the path with the actual mounted path to your yaboot.conf on your HFS boot partition.)
[doublepost=1505632473][/doublepost]

What is going on?! This stupid OS (so far) can't stop throwing errors at me! Damn it, what's the problem now??

Yes, welcome to Linux. Be prepared to work through countless errors. In the Linux/PPC world you will encounter errors which Google has no evident record of. Push on with it if you're interested, take notes and set out to pioneer your own solutions to fix the issues.

This is where the real challenges are when compared to generic, stable x86_64 flavours. You could easily be the first to encounter an error which evidently has no documented solution.

Be patient with yourself. If it gets too hard, you can always return to our faithful old cats, Leopard and Tiger.

 

[z970]

Bring up the Terminal (or xterm) application and then something like:

sudo leafpad /path/to/yaboot.conf

Or you can do the edit at the terminal with pico or vi, e.g

sudo pico /path/to/yaboot.conf

(Replacing the path with the actual mounted path to your yaboot.conf on your HFS boot partition.)
[doublepost=1505632473][/doublepost]

Yes, welcome to Linux. Be prepared to work through countless errors. In the Linux/PPC world you will encounter errors which Google has no evident record of. Push on with it if you're interested, take notes and set out to pioneer your own solutions to fix the issues.

This is where the real challenges are when compared to generic, stable x86_64 flavours. You could easily be the first to encounter an error which evidently has no documented solution.

Be patient with yourself. If it gets too hard, you can always return to our faithful old cats, Leopard and Tiger.

You, sir, are one of my favorite persons here.

 

[z970]

Unplug the second drive, install Lubuntu, and see if it boots then. It's unfortunately the only way I have personally gotten it to work, it's able to still dual boot if you reconnect the secondary Leopard drive after Lubuntu has finished installing, and hold Option (or Alt on a Windows keyboard) on boot to go to the boot selection menu, but that screen takes a while to load which slows down booting tremendously. I'm still working out how to fix that.

Editing yaboot.conf didn't work, so I tried your method, which didn't work.

I'm pretty sure that if I try Aphotic's method of switching drives, it's just going to boot into OS X.

Do you think it's 16.04?

It doesn't even have a splash screen, so would the easiest method perhaps be trying a different version? 12.04, maybe 14.04? Do you think this will be fixed in 18.04, let alone if PPC is even getting a port...

At this point, I'm thinking of jumping ship to another ship. Nothing seems to please 16.04.

 

[Dronecatcher]

Why not try Debian? Full walk through here and you can precisely control what gets installed:

http://ppcluddite.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/installing-debian-linux-on-ppc-part-i.html

 

[z970]

Why not try Debian? Full walk through here and you can precisely control what gets installed:

http://ppcluddite.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/installing-debian-linux-on-ppc-part-i.html

No thanks, I like Lubuntu. It's the simplest and least resource-intensive.

I'll find a way eventually, even if it means going to 14.04.

 

[Dronecatcher]

It's the simplest and least resource-intensive.

Are you sure about that

 

[z970]

OK, new plan.

I'm gonna have a go at 14.04.5, god willing it will go much smoother (it does say 'trusty' after all), and then when 16.04 hits 16.04.5, I'll re-burn that to a disc and try again. Maybe they will have fixed the installation woes. Maybe it will have a splash screen!

So that's downloading right now, 815 MB. Will burn that to a DVD because I don't have any CDs right now, and 815 MB is larger than 700 MB. Bit of a waste of 4.7 GBs, though. Oh well.

Hopefully, 14.04 will like my machine better than 16.04 in its current state.

I'll let you guys know how it turned out when that's over.

 

[LightBulbFun]

14.04 will run worse on your G5 then 16.04 LTS does Just an FYI... (for example your GPU aint going to work at all)

I recommend using ubuntu mate and trying a different hard disk along with making sure the drive is in the top slot of the drive cage, SATA slot "A" "upper"

I have personally installed or helped someone install Ubuntu mate 16.04LTS on the following macs, PowerMac 7,3 10,1 11,2, PowerBook5,8 and 5,9, they all run it nicely.

 

[z970]

14.04 will run worse on your G5 then 16.04 LTS does Just an FYI... (for example your GPU aint going to work at all)

I recommend using ubuntu mate and trying a different hard disk along with making sure the drive is in the top slot of the drive cage, SATA slot "A" "upper"

I have personally installed or helped someone install Ubuntu mate 16.04LTS on the following macs, PowerMac 7,3 10,1 11,2, PowerBook5,8 and 5,9, they all run it nicely.

Thank you for your help and concern, but I'll take my chances. At least for now.

 

[z970]

14.04 will run worse on your G5 then 16.04 LTS does Just an FYI... (for example your GPU aint going to work at all)

I recommend using ubuntu mate and trying a different hard disk along with making sure the drive is in the top slot of the drive cage, SATA slot "A" "upper"

I have personally installed or helped someone install Ubuntu mate 16.04LTS on the following macs, PowerMac 7,3 10,1 11,2, PowerBook5,8 and 5,9, they all run it nicely.

*shuffles back into group with head down*

Can you put LXDE into Ubuntu Mate?

Can you also make the menu bar white?

...What are the chances of regular Ubuntu 16.04 being soon, eventually, ported to PPC?

 

[LightBulbFun]

Lubuntu and Ubuntu mate 16.04-LTS *should* both work the same and be on the same feature level but I have personally not played with Lubuntu in a long time so I cant confirm this, hence why I recommend ubuntu mate

Ubuntu Mate theme-able yeah granted im not one to theme stuff so I have not played with that aspect of it

from what I have seen (and tested) unity does not work on PPC, last time i tried, logging in just kicks you back out to the login screen, but its been a long time since i last tried. keep in mind unity is quite a heavy environment even for lower end x86 systems so it would be quite slow on anything bar a G5 quad LOL