Messages

1

Applications and Porting / Re: [GAMES] Raptor Call of the Shadows

« on: April 18, 2025, 08:53:42 am »

Thanks much for helping out. Wondering if you could see any log that might help the author with troubleshooting the no sound effect issue?

2

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 42

« on: April 17, 2025, 06:03:44 am »

Is it still possible to fire up an X11 session? Are the packages gone and it can't be done anymore?

Well GDM has disabled X11 Session. Users are forced to go with Wayland moving forward. To me it makes no difference because X11 apps can function fine with XWayland

3

Applications and Porting / Re: [GAMES] Raptor Call of the Shadows

« on: April 16, 2025, 11:53:52 pm »

The author is asking for help from the POWER community.

If you are running PPC64BE Linux distro, could you please compile the dev git branch and let the author know if the game works?

Many thanks

4

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Fedora 42

« on: April 15, 2025, 08:26:28 am »

Fedora 42 ships the nearly-final GCC 15 compiler along with Golang 1.24, the LLVM 20 toolchain, PHP 8.4, Ruby 3.4, and a ton of other software upgrades. If GNOME isn't your thing, KDE Plasma 6.3 is available along with the Xfce 4.20, LXQt 2.1 and Cosmic Alpha 6 desktops. The new kernel 6.14.2 play nicely with ppc64le. I have not encountered any major issue.

GNOME 48 is actually quite good now. The only thing does not work for me is the new Loupe Image Viewer which is unable to view any image.

5

GPU Compute / Accelerators / Re: AMD OpenCL / ROCm

« on: April 08, 2025, 09:33:45 pm »

AFAIK it's unfortunate that we won't be able to take advantage of ROCm HIP for Blender simply because ROCm's codebase is not architecture-agnostic. There has been efforts in the past to get ROCm code compile on PPC64 with little attention from AMD. Recent codebase move so quickly most patches for PPC64 would be out of sync.

I hope that Vulkan Compute would become more mature in the future. Wishful thinking I know...

6

GPU Compute / Accelerators / Re: Which .bin files to use

« on: April 03, 2025, 07:43:41 pm »

this page: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/AMDGPU suggests amdgpu/dimgrey_cavefish_{ce,me,mec2,rlc,smc,ta,dmcub,mec,pfp,sdma,sos,vcn}.bin, which i've tried and never gotten to work. Maybe it's because my firmware is out of date. A guy on IRC told me you should just check your petitboot's dmesg (you can still do this over serial if your VGA is disabled with the jumper) and see what firmware files it complains about, which may be more than just the ones strictly necessary for your card.

It should be the dimney_cavefish. However please note that the BMC runs old Linux version. The known working version is 6.1.0. So you have to compile a custom OpenBMC yourself with newer kernel version... why don't you give that a go?

7

Applications and Porting / [GAMES] Raptor Call of the Shadows

« on: April 03, 2025, 07:20:34 pm »

One of the best DOS games in the 90s. The port itself is open sourced by the original author.

Video: https://youtu.be/5ONEkjAw-1o

8

Applications and Porting / Re: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault War Chest (OpenMoHAA)

« on: March 26, 2025, 10:07:12 pm »

Hi

Thank you for contributing to OpenMoHAA and testing it.

I watched your three videos with OpenMoHAA, and I'm surprised it works so well on your computer. I was expecting some weird bugs and stability issues because this project didn't have too many PPC Linux users. 

I know that Cowcat had some problems porting it to MorphOS (PPC), but maybe that would helped with some issues on the Raptor computers.

The POWER9 has more than enough juice to run the game smoothly despite of the fact there is no JIT VM support for PPC64LE.

9

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 42 Beta

« on: March 26, 2025, 06:13:26 pm »

A consistent UI is what had BeOS 30 years ago, now Haiku.  All written in C++ and completely unrelated to X11. Strangely, no one came up with the idea of porting that ready-made UI to Linux, they just messed around with Gnome and KDE. On Wayland the most suitable for me is Hyprland, unfortunately it is still far from full functionality.

BeOS is truly a cohesive and unique ecosystem. However it is not fair to say its UX is the most pleasant to use. Big guys like MS and Apple are still trying to figure out the UX as the hardware has advanced at rapid pace introducing new ways of doing interaction. GNOME and KDE will likely play the followers role than leading the industry. It's unfortunate yet understandable...

10

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Linux 6.14

« on: March 26, 2025, 08:12:51 am »

It is out! More details could be found at https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.14

There are no mentioning of any PowerPC-related changes unfortunately.

11

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 42 Beta

« on: March 25, 2025, 07:41:53 am »

At my place Wayland works strangely, and in fact a whole bunch of applications have problems with it, and I don't have the strength to inquire whether it's just the protocol or not. To me, it's just an incomplete product, which instead of bridging the divide between different DEs only exacerbates it by blaming the lack of support for a certain element on some DE or library. The result is that applications written for one DE will not work well on another. Applications with the latest Gtk are already a complete departure, they operate according to the principle of if you're with us it's ok if you're with us and if you're not it's off.

Spot on! Things have changed, we no longer have to mix and match softwares, WMs and DE like we used to. These days you pick one faction and stick with it. To be fair I find myself more productive with such DEs because of consistent UX. It's amazing to see how far Linux desktop has come! Having said that I sometimes miss those old days forever poking into countless of combination of configs and softwares.

12

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] Using Java's Vector API on PPC64LE

« on: March 23, 2025, 03:32:02 am »

The core team doesn't seem to be interested in having it supported:
https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/5238

No idea how large a project making a fork would be; assumption is that its a very large porting effort.

I can understand why many projects choose not to simply because they do not have access to the hardware. What IF we could have a super performant x86->ppc64 translation in VM like how Apple or MS does x86->arm64... if IBM truly cares, I am pretty sure it could be done

13

Applications and Porting / Re: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault War Chest (OpenMoHAA)

« on: March 23, 2025, 03:28:33 am »

Great thanks for buying me the game on GOG

Here is the video of the game running:

https://youtu.be/4rqId3r36Hg
https://youtu.be/PO-tbW1O1Qg

14

General Discussion / Re: Samsung PRO 980 1TB NVMe is working flawlessly

« on: March 19, 2025, 06:53:47 pm »

Code: [Select]

shrimp-paste [tle]$ uname -ar
Linux shrimp-paste 6.14.0-0.rc6.49.fc42.ppc64le #1 SMP Mon Mar 10 23:19:40 UTC 2025 ppc64le GNU/Linux

/dev/nvme0n1:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 4972 MB in  3.01 seconds = 1650.85 MB/sec
shrimp-paste [tle]$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/nvme0n1
and it's getting worse in Fedora 42

15

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 42 Beta

« on: March 19, 2025, 08:27:23 am »

I, unfortunately, said goodbye to the Fedora distribution... I still need X11 and that will not change for a long time. Gnome is getting more and more frustrating from version to version. I went back to simplicity, FreeBSD 14.2 + X11 + Enlightenment 0.27 ;-)

Your choice is solid and will last for years. Having said that it's seems to me Wayland will be slowly dethroning X11 whether we like it or not.

I personally have no issue with Wayland because most apps I am using are performing correctly with native Wayland or via XWayland. Simply put I am getting boring as I am getting older. Now all I want is a conventional, productive and boring UX like that of GNOME or KDE.