gutsy doesn't boot completely on powerpc

I have gutsy installed on my G4 powerpc.

It looks to me like the ide driver is not getting loaded.

Here's what I tried.

boot with:
boot> Linux break=premount

At the initramfs prompt the command "ls /proc/"shows no directory for ide.
IIRC there is also no /proc/partitions.

I've sucessefully loaded ide-core with modprobe at the the initramfs prompt for both break=top and break=premount.

At this point if I exit the initramfs shell and continue I get a lot of device-mapper errors.

Unfortunately as Rogério said there is no boot log or dmesg at this piont.

The initrd is probably to large to attach. But I can extract it and compress a smaller part of it to attach.
What part of it will be most helpful?

Thanks

digger

Hi.

Unfortunately, I didn't have the same luck as digger did, even if I boot on the yaboot prompt with live break=premount.

I tried that and then, when booting, I was just dumped on the "(initramfs)" prompt and I did, as digger suggested, modprobe ide-core. Instantly I heard my CD drive spinning up and I was quite happy that it did so.

I then exited the initramfs shell with the "exit" command and the system was accessing the (live) CD-ROM quite a bit (and I was happy with that).

But the, much to my surprise, I got the following messages (taken on a paper, since I had a kernel panic):

init: illegal runlevel: (null)
Try `init --help' for more information
(initramfs) exit
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

I would appreciate any help with this. I would like to use Ubuntu and get rid of any non-Free Software on my iBook G3.

BTW, if busybox provided any kind of dmesg, I could report what I could (I don't know how to get that if I can't put it on any other media).

Anyway, would it be possible to have the ide-core module built into the kernel or would it break the installation process (but it is apparently broken for other people also, though).

Well, *any* help is surely apreciated.

Regards, Rogério Brito.

Its probably not the correct way to go about it but I made the script

/etc/initramfs-tools/scripts/init-top/load_ide_core

it just simply does a "modprobe ide_core"

It now boots okay.

It don't fully understand the boot process. If working correctly should the ide be auto-detected?
Or does it need to manualy loaded?

Disregard the device-mapper errors in my last comment that belongd to another bug.

Thanks,

digger

Hi, Digger.

On 7/18/07, digger vermont <email address hidden> wrote:
> Its probably not the correct way to go about it but I made the script
>
> /etc/initramfs-tools/scripts/init-top/load_ide_core
>
> it just simply does a "modprobe ide_core"
>
> It now boots okay.

Unfortunately, this still doesn't work for me. :-(

Since I need to use Linux on my machine, I would sincerely love to see
this bug fixed in Gutsy, with a consistent, well-designed distribution
that Ubuntu is.

Regards, Rogério Brito.

Dear maintainers,

I would be willing to do any tests here to get Gutsy working on my system (and, thus, have an Ubuntu system working on many iBook G3's). If you feel you need any piece of information, please, don't hesitate to ask.

Thanks, Rogério Brito.

Hi Rogério,

Are you still trying the live CD or do you have gutsy installed?

I'd like to try and confirm that we're talking about the same problem.
If so then according to my understanding of the guidelines for bugs
I can bump from New to Confirmed.

Maybe we'll get some attention then.

Can you try this with the 2.6.22 kernel?
You might also confirm with an earlier kernel (I still have 2.6.20) that
you know works.

At the yaboot boot prompt:

        boot: Linux break=top (assuming that's the kernel in question)

When the scrolling stops I need to press enter to get the busybox initramfs prompt.

Then:

        initramfs: cat /proc/devices

I do not hve any entries for ide under "Block devices:". Do You?

        initramfs: ls /proc/ide

I get the response:

ls: /proc/ide: No such file or directory

Do you?

        initramfs: modprobe ide_core

I get output that shows the ide driver loading and finding the ide controllers
and ide drives. On my powerbook it looks like this.

Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00alpha2
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
ide0: Found Apple KeyLargo ATA-4 controller, bus ID 2, irq 19
Probing IDE interface ide0...
hda: TOSHIBA MK3018GAS, ATA DISK drive
hda: Enabling Ultra DMA 4
ide0 at 0xe1016000-0xe1016007,0xe1016160 on irq 19
ide1: Found Apple KeyLargo ATA-3 controller, bus ID 0, irq 20
Probing IDE interface ide1...
hdc: MATSHITACD-RW CW-8121, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdc: Enabling MultiWord DMA 2
ide1 at 0xe101e000-0xe101e007,0xe101e160 on irq 20
ide2: Found Apple KeyLargo ATA-3 controller, bus ID 1, irq 21

Have you made it this far?

At this point I can exit the shell and I have a successfull boot.

        initramfs: exit

If you can't complete booting at this point maybe you have additional problems
that are confusing the issue.

Thanks,

digger

Looking at Rogério's decription it seem it looks like there is more than problem.
I made a bug report specific to the ide driver issue.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/initramfs-tools/+bug/131150

digger

Dear Digger,

I am sorry for the lack of replies. I was busy with some packages of mine entering Debian (and reporting the problems that I saw to Apple, as they have a pretty serious problem in their fsck, which leads to a nasty segmentation fault).

Now, I am back to the task of trying the Ubuntu installation (since it seems that the next revision of MacOS X will drop support for my machine) and I desperately need an Operating System that is current and where I can use things to teach my students things with Free Software (and, to be sincere, the Fink Project for MacOS X isn't sufficient).

But most important of all, I need a Free Operating System, having already run Debian on this iBook (but I would like to distribute copies of this to my friends that still have G3 perfectly functional machines).

I am burning a CD with Gutsy right now and I will try the tests that you suggested. I will report back what I can.

Regards, Rogério Brito.

Dear Digger,

I have just successfully installed a preliminary version of Gutsy, but it was not without problems.

First of all, the CD that I had here was from 2007-07 and it didn't work. With the CD from the version 2007-08-08, I was able to go on yaboot, type "livre break=top" and I was dropped into a shell command.

There, as you said, I had similar problems with those that you did with ide: /proc/devices doesn't list the ide module loaded and /proc/ide doesn't exist.

After manually loading ide-core, the CD starts to spin up and, when I exit the shell, the installation *now* goes as intended up to X being launched and having gnome loaded. Unfortunately it seems that gnome-settings-daemon insists to die (unless I freeze it with C-z) and the general installation went well, despite four things:

1 - I don't get any sound because, apparently, both OSS and ALSA modules get loaded. I could get the computer to produce sound (beeps on the command line) removing some modules (I forgot which, as I am not using that notebook right now). Despite this, the gnome volume adjuster couldn't be loaded when I got to the Desktop loaded. :-( It *seems* to be segfaulting (but I can inspect that more cautiously).

2 - I don't get hardware acceleration (saw that via glxinfo), but I did when I used Debian proper (at least when I downgraded the number of colors of the desktop to 16 bit per pixel). The card is a ATI Rage 128 Mobility M3 with 8MB, with AGP x2, and the notebook's LCD has a resolution of 1024x768.

3 - I couldn't get in any way my wireless adaptor to work (which is the only option that I have to use the Network when I am not at home). I tried loading the rt2x00usb, but it didn't work, unfortunately. I tried loading the ieee80211_*wep and siblings, but iwconfig only told me that none of the adaptors present (lo and eth2) didn't have wireless extensions (eth2 is the proper ethernet card).

4 - Upon finally installing Ubuntu and booting, I get dropped on the initramfs prompt again. :-(

Well, that's the status right now, but I am slightly more hopeful since it at least installs (with quite some handholding, but it works).

BTW, the kernel that is distributed is 2.6.22-6, if I am not mistaken.

Thanks for any help, Rogério Brito.

Hello Rogério,

Just a quick reply to let you know I'm not lost but busy. I'll look
closer when I can give more thought to it.

digger

On Fri, 2007-08-10 at 22:26 +0000, Rogério Brito wrote:
> Dear Digger,
>
> I have just successfully installed a preliminary version of Gutsy, but
> it was not without problems.

...

Hi, Digger,

On Aug 14 2007, digger vermont wrote:
> Just a quick reply to let you know I'm not lost but busy. I'll look
> closer when I can give more thought to it.

Thanks for the feedback. I deleted the installation and I can install it
again.

Unfortunately, the newer CDs also have the very same problem (BTW, once
I installed gutsy, I downloaded a zillion packages---I thought that the
daily-build CD images were up-to-date).

Anyway, I can serve as a testbed for two or 3 weeks, but not much more.
I will have to use this iBook for some serious development then and it
would be a *sincere* pity to not have a recent Ubuntu working on PowerPC
machines.

Regards, Rogério Brito.

P.S.: If I recall correctly, Mark Shuttleworth had an iMac as one of his
computers. I guess that the fact that the PowerPC release of Ubuntu
isn't taken care of means that he can't use his computer?

If some care for this port is needed, perhaps I could join some forces,
as I do want to have it running well on my computer and it seems that
MacOS X 10.4 will be the last Operating System from Apple that will run
on this machine (unfortunately, as it is in a perfect state).

--
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{mackenzie,ime.usp}.br : GPG key 1024D/7C2CAEB8
http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito : http://meusite.mackenzie.com.br/rbrito
Projects: algorithms.berlios.de : lame.sf.net : vrms.alioth.debian.org

if the modprobe ide-core trick worked then this is most likely the same bug as Bug #131150 so i shall mark it as a duplicate

the sound problem could be https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.20/+bug/87652

for the other issues, please have a search in launchpad, if you cannot find them please fiel new bugs