Raptor Computing Systems Community Forums (BETA)
Software => Operating Systems and Porting => Topic started by: bw42 on June 23, 2020, 10:59:29 am
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I have been working on rebuilding Slackware64 Current on my Blackbird.
Its mostly there now, though a few applications are having some issues that need sorted.
I also need to find a place to host the packages.
I'm trying to sort out the boot requirements for creating an install image.
I understand Petitboot does a scan and is supposed to auto detect OSes.
What specifically is it scanning for?
Is there info somewhere on what needs to be setup for it to detect the installed OS?
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If it's visible to GRUB, it should be visible to Petitboot.
Nice job on the port!
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If it's visible to GRUB, it should be visible to Petitboot.
Thank you, I figured it was something like that.
Grub is one of the packages that keeps erroring on build.
I'll have to work on getting that one working.
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I think if you can crack that nut, you should be there. This delights me personally; Slackware was my first taste of Linux in 1998-ish (on an old 486 we christened "calvin").
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Slackware? Thank you very much for your effort!
I used the Slackware in the past (on intel and amd64 systems) and still thinking about return to it. It would be great to have it on my Blackbird...
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Funny, a month ago I asked Eric Hameleers if there is a possibility to port Slackware to PPC64le.
He said, I should ask Patrick Volkerding.
Sadly, he didn't response. Why not ask the Slackware people for hosting the packages?
Great work, BTW :)
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I got my Blackbird about a month ago and began working on the build.
I posted a couple updates on the Linuxquestions thread where people asked about a Power9 port.
I might try talking to Patrick Volkerding about mirroring them.
Once I get something that can actually install.
Right now I have a script that does a for loop through the directories and installs them in a folder for testing.
I extracted the Debian Grub packages and manually installed them on my Blackbird and it looks like it picks up the Slackware install just from running a grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
So I should be able to get that going enough to make a Slackware installer initrd.
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Hello, just registered to say a huge THANK YOU for porting Slackware - my preferred distro on x86 since some 2003/2004. My Blackbird is stuck three weeks on US customs, but just two days ago I was talking to some other czech Slackware users how to start on porting to POWER9 right after it arrives. Now I don't have to, someone else did it :)
But I can at least offer space for a mirror. I can spare 50-60GB on http://vivapowerpc.eu/software/ with SSH/SCP upload, if you need. Server is located in OVH datacentres in France and is (of course) powered by Slackware.
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I actually just got a VPS that I was working on.
I moved my blog site I made to it, though there's not much on it at the moment.
Was working on getting Mirror Brain configured to upload the packages to.
Once I get it setup the blog site will be at https://www.riscyslack.org and mirror will be https://mirror.riscyslack.org
That's the plan at least.
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Once I get it setup the blog site will be at https://www.riscyslack.org and mirror will be https://mirror.riscyslack.org
That's the plan at least.
Can you please consider a RSS channel for your blog?
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There isn't much useful information on my blog site at the moment, but I added an RSS feed.
https://www.riscyslack.org/?feed
It's mostly my ramblings of constantly almost having a useful build.
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Thanks for creating the RSS feed - added you to my aggregated feed: http://vivapowerpc.eu/world
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Guess that means I should start using normal titles instead of random jokes about Star Trek and such.
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Star Trek jokes are fine as long as your blog is green! ;)
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The initial packages and source files have been uploaded to https://mirror.riscyslack.org
I started this from a snapshot of Slackware64-current, its been a little over a month, so its probably a little out of sync with the official version.
I also got tired of fighting with KDE 4 and just dumped it for Alien Bob's KTown 5.19, so a lot of out of sync.
There isn't an installer at the moment, but the packages can be extracted to a folder or drive, and with a couple tweaks, be made into a mostly functional Slackware install.
I put the tarballs with the files from Debian's grub powerpc packages under Other for now.
I just extracted them to root with tar xvf *.txz -C /
They also need libdevmapper.so linked to libdevmapper.so.1.02.1 for the Debian grub-mkconfig to work.
I had to create an /etc/fstab with the mount entries and then run grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg to be able to boot directly into.
In case anyone hasn't noticed, I call it Riscy Slack. One because its for PowerPC64LE which is a RISC architecture, and two because its an unofficial build, so use at your own risk.
I'm still working on reverse engineering the process Patrick uses to do all the package signing and stuff for making it look like a proper mirror usable with Slackpkg.
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https://www.riscyslack.org/?feed
It's mostly my ramblings of constantly almost having a useful build.
Thank you! Every information about progress of your work is interesting.
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I managed to get an initrd containing the Slackware Setup scripts to boot!
A big step closer to having a proper installable version.
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I've updated the mirror a bit with new packages and fixes, and almost always remembered to put something in the Changelog.txt, almost.
There is now an .iso file on the mirror.
https://mirror.riscyslack.org/RiscySlack/current-iso/
I tested it by mounting it as a virtual drive in the OpenBMC console.
Petitboot detected it and allows it to boot.
After that you can fdisk or cfdisk your drives and run Setup like a normal Slackware setup.
You'll have to ignore the MBR error and tell it not to install Lilo.
I haven't modified the Setup script to remove that yet.
After installing you'll need to exit back to bash and chroot /mnt
then run grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
After rebooting Petitboot should detect the install and automatically load it.
If you use the NIC that's shared with the BMC you'll want to edit /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf to set eth2 USE_DHCP[2]="yes"
I've also noticed the gpu doesn't always reinitialize on my Radeon RX580 after reboot.
When that happens I end up having to shutdown, then boot back up.
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Excellent progress!
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Playing with it this morning I found that the Konqueror browser works with QTWebEngine, but crashes when set to use QTWebKit or KHTML.
Looks like a QT4 DBus lib is missing.
Working on rebuilding to see if I can get it working.
Krita still just hangs on loading :/
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Oh yeah, Slackpkg is patched to support ppc64le for my mirror.
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I updated a lot of packages to bring it closer to sync with Slackware64-current.
But of course Mr. Volkerding released new updates well I was doing that.
So its closer, but a moving target.
I managed to get Krita working with the new version of QT5.
Also, managed to figure out enough patches to get QT4 to build, so that exists now.
Its more usable, yay!
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Great. Is Volkerding aware of your work?
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He marked one of my posts in the thread on Linux Questions helpful, so I assume that means he's aware.
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I also installed Slackware successfully on my Blackbird.
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I also installed Slackware successfully on my Blackbird.
I know its a bit rough and not in sync with upstream yet. But I would love to hear your thoughts on it.
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Finally managed to get decent 1TB NVMe instead of my ancient 64 GB SATA SSD and therefor I tried my favorite distro, which in fact I use on all my other (x86, x64 and ARM) computers. Everything was smooth, no surprise during the install, Riscy Slackware boots on my 8C Blackbird like a marvel ...
... but then one surprise emerged: It seems that the content of http://mirror.riscyslack.org/RiscySlack/riscyslack64-current/slackware64/ is not the same what is on the current install ISO. To be precise some quite important libraries are missing on the ISO, like libXaw or libXMu, so I couldn't even start xterm. No big deal - downloading txz packages from mirror and installing them manually fixed this. But now I have to find out what else didn't install.
Is there any reason for this?
(Anyway: thanks for bringing my native distro to my native platform!)
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I'm not sure why they are missing, the .iso is generated each morning automatically form the contents of the mirror.
I'll see if I can find out why they weren't there.
Thanks for letting me know.
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The iso was from January 4th, I still have it somewhere on my drive if needed for examination.
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It looks like when I updated the mirror structure a couple months ago to add the extras mirror I forgot to update my makeiso script for the new folder name.
So it was building the .iso file off an old copy of the current folder that was missing the libXaw and libXmu packages.
Its been corrected and should properly match the riscyslack64-current folder.
Thank you again for letting me know.
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Wonderful! So the fastest and most convenient way to check for missing libraries will for me be downloading new ISO and reinstalling, since I didn't do much in the fresh install yesterday. Again, thanks for all the slacks!
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Running a slackpkg install-new should also list things that aren't installed.
As a heads up if you use sbopkg or download slackbuilds, you might want to add a ppc64le section to the $ARCH portion of the .SlackBuild file.
Without adding it the scripts tend to try installing libraries in the /usr/lib and /lib folders instead of /lib64 and /usr/lib64
Usually just adding something like the below right before the else section works to make it work like Slackware64.
elif [ "$ARCH" = "ppc64le" ]; then
SLKCFLAGS="-O2"
LIBDIRSUFFIX="64"
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I will write about it more in detail on vivaPowerPC, but I decided to put things I slackbuild for my machine on the server for others. I try to mimick well known structure of Alien's SlackBuilds as much as possible.
There are only few packages there, well I just started, SlackBuild scripts have the ppc64le section added and if possible I try to build from as fresh versions as possible. The source package used to build is also in the build folder.
I'm adding single line with my contact to every SlackBuild script, so people can send curses directly to me and not to the original maintainer.
If anyone of you is brave enough: http://vivapowerpc.eu/software/SlackBuilds/ (http://vivapowerpc.eu/software/SlackBuilds/)