If you are unaware, PPC linux has started to gain Void as @stenstorp is way smarter than me, and a few other people, and now we have a chroot install of void linux installed on a powerbook (titanium?) G4 and running with i3. Now, my project might go from a distro to a different way to send and recieve packages or tar sources to then use as a ppc repo for void… IDK but I’m thinking about it. I was wrong, and whoever said that porting void would be easier was right blah blah.
still want upstart and systemd available though… thats why we fork things HUE
ANY WAYS THIS IS C O O L
So now, I want to set off building packages. The way to install void on PPC is through chroot, which I’m still trying to understand but I’ll get there eventually. And ATM this is temporary. With that, I want to test packages running on actual hardware. I also want to BUILD packages on actual hardware, but also compare those packages to others built on X86. Just because… I’m actually really curious to see if there is an actual difference. Does one run faster? More or less ram? IDK, I wanna see though.
So obv I need a chrootable environment, which for me is lubuntu 12.04 on my 1GHZ emac, and potentially on my powermac G5. But what I want to know is… Should I do 12.04, or is it better to use 14.04 / 16.04? 16.04 just crashes. Like if I take mate and do too many things on it it straight up dies and the machine freezes / halts. I can leave it sit for days and nothing.
Thats the other thing I want to know is does it do this because of cross-compile? And if everything was built native would it still do this? Is it a GTK bug? SystemD having a fatass? Theres a lot of stuff I need to research to address the really quite weird behavior PPC linux seems to have always had.
So, with all that info, let me know. IDK what would be best to do, and if my investigation would be worth the time or stupid. But I’ll learn something from it.
From a development perspective, you might have library problems if you’re writing code. The best plan is to replicate the environment you’re developing for as closely as possible.
All it does is tell program X what is the top level directory. If your chroot is in /mnt and program X tries to access /usr/lib/libc.so.6 then the request is just redirected to /mnt/usr/lib/libc.so.6.
If your compiling on actual PPC hardware then you need to make sure that the operating system your building is not contaminated by the host. i would HIGHLY suggest looking into LFS (Linux from scratch) if your going to be doing any low level work on this (glibc, gcc, binutils, etc)
You’re making me blush!
I haven’t quite worked out a chroot install yet either. What I would do is just install Lubuntu 12.04, make a new partition on your drive, put the void rootfs in there, chroot into it and just get onto it! There’s no real performance loss for doing it in a chroot. I’ll see if I can get one of the other guys to write up a guide on getting it booting properly.
Chroot install is how you install Gentoo from the livecd using a stage{1…3} method. You basically create the partitions, mount them on a relative path inside your live environment and unpack the distro contents on the newly created tree. After you have the files on place you still have to mount some virtual file systems like /proc, /dev and /sys and proceed to chroot into your new directory structure. While chrooted you are basically inside the operating system you are building so now you need to do stuff that needs to be executed from inside the OS like installing additional packages and writing the bootloader code.
This method is also great for rescuing broken systems and somewhat workable for cloning systems where you don’t have a more appropriate tool.
