When I try to boot from the livecd on my 2.5 GHz G5, I just get stuck with a grey screen. No bootloader, no error messages, nothing. I've tried the 2004.2 and 2004.1 minimal ppc livecds. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Insert LiveCD into G5's optical drive 2. Reboot, holding down the 'C' key Actual Results: Screen goes grey and no further progress occurs. Expected Results: Boots into linux. :)
Have you tried the PPC64 LiveCD?
I hadn't, but I just tried the ppc64 2004.2-beta3 CD and it produces the same result.
OK, I've made some progress. Apparently the superdrive *must* be set to master in order to boot from it. Now the ppc64 CD boots fine, but I'm getting the "login prompt w/ unknown scrambled root password" problem that others have reported. I get a bootloader prompt with the ppc32 2004.2 and 2004.1 livecds now, but after I select a kernel (doesn't matter which one, G5 or G5-SMP) it gets stuck with this on the screen: ... ok opening display /pci@0,f0000000/ATY,ElanParent@10/ATY,Elan_B@1... ok copying OF device tree...done starting cpu /cpus/PowerPC,G5...failed: 00000000 calling quiesce ... returning 0x01400000 from prom_init _
Quick update: The 2004.2 beta5 ppc64 livecd seems to work, but unfortunately the mac-fdisk on it is broken. The ppc32 livecd fails to boot as per comment 3.
I'll have a look at building a 2004.3 release candidate for ppc32 this week
you might try beta 6 from ppc64 which was released last night. Tihs contains a newer kernel. However in your case the fdisk issue I wonder if it isn't the same problem that we saw with a dual 1.8 Ghz system. Basically the user zapped their pram and it cleared itself up.
As I mentioned in bug 64739, zapping the PRAM doesn't help. I'll try the beta 6 CD though.
No luck with ppc64 beta 6. It completely locks up after a short time - the cursor keeps blinking but I can't do anything, not even change virtual terminals. :(
Apart from the keymap weirdness of bug 68339, the ppc64 2004.3 beta 1 livecd seems to work great on my 2.5 GHz G5. Thermal control and everything. Shall we consider this bug fixed, or wait until ppc32 has been tested?
tgall: ppc32 will have a gentoo-dev-sources 2.6.9 kernel for G5 machines. is that enough to ensure 2.5Ghz support. I've also had somebody ask me whether nvidia 6800 would work on a 30" in linux
I htink if you pull in the thermal patch from benh, things might be ok on a ppc32 kernel for 7,3 power macintosh hardware. The cautionary tale is that benh isn't maintainer ppc32 much anymore. He can best speak for himself on that one. I honstly don't know the state of imac g5 hardware. I really wish I had one of those in person or benh or someone in the kernel hacking crown with bring up experience as from the boot logs I've seen thus far I think support for this hardware is close. I don't know that status of the 6800 nvidia hardware. I do know i haven't had much success with my 23" lcd from apple :-/. But this is a 9600 radeon card in that case.
The keymap stuff should be fixed in genkernel 3.1.0, which is in portage now. Essentially, if the user does not select a keymap, then we do not force one, but rather exit gracefully. This should keep ppc64's keymap from getting hosed automatically by genkernel.
new 2004.3 beta 2 livecd release. Beta1 was reported as successfully booting on this hardware. Beta2 I have confirmed does fix the keymap issues.
going to close, good reports thus far.