Report on LiveDVD 17.04 Alpha testing on Powermac 3,1 G4

Support & Help Requests
#1

Folks:

Downloaded a daily of 17.04 PPC alpha recently and a couple days ago found the time to boot it up and give it a test run. Initially there were a bunch of I/O errors while booting up, which went on for awhile until we finally got to cursor and GUI session–so that part was fine and didn’t require any boot params to get done.

But, the “Welcome” screen appeared, however it was devoid of data; Software Boutique was the same. I believe that both of these apps produced a crash report window, can’t be sure since the crash window opened a bit after launching the session–the first one said, “Executable path-- /usr/lib/powerpc-linux-gnu/webkit2gtk-4.0/WebKitWebProcess” . . . with a further error when I tried to upload the crash report that it generated . . . “cannot connect to crash database-plz check internet connection.” I opened a Terminal and ran “ping google.com” and it showed connection was fine. Possibly something with apport that is not working?

No Firefox or any web browser seemed included?

There was, as mentioned, another crash as I tried to restart out of the session, possibly from the Software Boutique app that opened to an empty window–since it was logging out I didn’t see if the report said anything different than the first one.

“Restart” goes to a blinking cursor on black background . . . “failed deactivating swap” . . . and then didn’t restart after the disk was ejected–had to hit the power button to shut down.

That’s the report from PPC-land for 17.04 U-MATE, some things like basic GUI were fine out of the box, but, still very “Alpha” in nature.

n_s

#2

So I’m not sure how you managed to grab a PPC version of 17.04 in the first place since:

There’s no such version available for download on http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-mate/releases/17.04/alpha-2/

Edit: found the page you must have used: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-mate/daily-live/current/

I’m guessing that’s an automated build that just hasn’t come around to being wiped.
There will be no 17.04 PPC release, so thanks for your efforts but testing is not necessary.

#3

Since the newest version of WebKit2 is running on PowerPC, it will be related to this bug report and the window will stay blank forever.

However, as @ouroumov rightly points out, PowerPC support is being dropped 17.04 onwards.

1 Like
#4

Also this about PPC

#5

What? Et Tu Brute? Ubuntu-MATE is dropping support for PPC??? Very sad news indeed . . . interesting that the fastest response(s) I’ve gotten to a post on a PPC related topic is about the dropping of support for it. The “death spiral” for PPC has been happening for quite awhile, devs saying “nobody is testing PPC” and PPC users saying, “nobody is fixing the problems” . . . .

Sayonara PPC linux, we hardly knew yee . . . .

n_s

#6

PowerPC release images have been dropped following a decision from the Ubuntu Technical Board.

Consequently Ubuntu MATE and Lubuntu, the only flavours still supporting PowerPC, will not be releasing any new PowerPC images.

#7

Thanks for the numerous replies on this topic; since there was a daily of PPC 17.04 I thought I would check it out and provide a brief feedback, even if it is or was the final swan song of PPC in the debian/ubuntu world.

However, considering the numbers of posts on this “it’s over for PPC” I would have appreciated this level of team response on the recent problems in 16.04 PPC and the suggested upgrading of MATE to 1.16 . . . which essentially wiped the MATE DE or obfuscated the packages such that it no work no more . . . . Only Wolfman gave a modest try at offering a fix for something that prolly should have been an “easy” upgrading process for an LTS release??

Alright gents, later on

n_s

#8

I’m not sure the narky response is really necessary.

#9

Dear Vegetable:

First, you are posting your comment in a thread that I am the OP of, and
indeed your passive-agro post doesn’t add anything at all helpful to the
thread. Secondly, if you think that is “narky” then you likely haven’t had
any experience with the issues and problems that are involved with trying
to run linux on a PPC computer . . . .

And, thirdly, you probably then don’t know what a pain it is to have to
re-install or re-download the 16.04 installer and re-install a whole system
due to following the suggestion posted in the forum to try to add a ppa to
upgrade the DE . . . only to discover that in PPC that lunched the DE, and
not only did it lunch the DE, but the system now can’t “regress” back to
MATE 1.14 . . . so all the upgrades and applications that were added onto
the MATE system are now “toast” . . . .

And, in comparison to the responses here, the response on that thread was
rather blase’ . . . . Merely pointing that out is far from “narky” . . .
perhaps the only thing “narkier” is your wan post. Prolly you don’t
understand what you are referring to, or haven’t gone through the many
“oopsies” and so forth that go along with running the PPC systems . . .
whereas U-MATE came out gangbusters only a little while ago as “supporting
PPC” . . . .

I’m not at all blaming U-MATE for dropping PPC support, but definitely the
“add the ppa & upgrade your DE” suggestion was not tested at all in PPC.
“Here is your blob DE” is what I’m left with . . . nothing new in PPC-land
. . . nothing else to be said on it. And your post is not at all helpful
considering the blob that I am left with. Peace out.

#10

Maybe some other distro will have the support you want.

Debian

Fedora

Opensuse

2 Likes
#11

@anon42388993:

Thanks for the thought . . . appreciate the effort to help out. Of course the reason the ubuntu is dropping PPC is that Debian made that decision . . . and many distros are based upon Debian. Possibly Fedora may stagger forward with support, I’m not sure if they are based on Debian as well; I think a few years back I looked at it but at the time it seemed that the ubuntu distros were “more better” . . . .

And, indeed I did recently start to use OpenSuse, but they have never or at least not recently, offered a PPC iso . . . it is a nice system and the forum does offer fast and helpful information. For PPC I still like Ubuntu-MATE very much, 16.04 was fine, I just went for what I thought would be a “simple” DE upgrade to the base 16.04 system and the mission resulted in discombobulation . . . and it is now “MATE” Xubuntu 16.04.

n_s

1 Like
#12

Your WUM posts were never funny. 6 or 7 years later, that certainly remains the case.

Yes, the ppa could be more fool-proof, but then you really should know by now that ppa’s don’t work with powerpc.

A re-install is/was entirely unnecessary. You could of easily gone back to 1.12 (you’ve never had 1.14 on powerpc).