Hello guys

I rencently bought a second hand Pegasos 2 (i gave mine away a few months ago and I was missing it) and i'm thinking about installing a linux distro on it again.

What are the most up to date distros for the Pegasos2 at the moment ? Which ones are easy to install, or needs tweaking ? What about Ubuntu Hardy, Gentoo 2008.1 or Debian Leny ?

thanks for you help and advices.

For obvious reasons (I'm a SuSE fan), I'd suggest http://en.opensuse.org/Pegasos
I did not test Debian recently.
I also have Gentoo running, but it does not have an exact version number, as it was upgraded incrementally in the past couple of years.
For Ubuntu check out http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/vi ... 1235#11235 and the rest of the thread. Disclaimer: I don't use it, but others reported both problems and success :)

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Thanks Peter for pointing me in the right directions.
I always found Suse to be a bit slow on Peg2 and i never really liked the package system (i love gentoo and debian for that). But i may give it a try !

cheers !

openSUSE has a new command line package management tool, which is quite fast: zypper See http://en.opensuse.org/Zypper for details!

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

thanks Peter, it's worth trying.
Do you know if it's possible to do a net install instead of downloading the 4GB suse DVD ?

Actually I never use the DVD :-) Put those 4 files somewhere on an ext2/ext3 partition on the Peg, and that is all you need as initial download.

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

No slower than Ubuntu or Debian ever were.

Actually 11.0 is one of the best Linux distros I've ever seen, I am hoping 11.1 comes out on time because for all intents and purposes it should be an amazing distribution.

As for packaging, Peter noted that it uses a new system (zypper, libzypp and an insanely fast dependency solver, underneath the YaST GUI which still stayed as bad as it ever was, but who uses that?).

Among other features it allows delta RPMs (which means if you have 11.0.1-1 of a package installed and you update to 11.0.1-2, but only 2 files out of 1000 changed, it only has the two changed files, meaning download is faster and installation is faster) and also LZMA compression for packages which means decompression is far faster, compression is smaller, and uses less memory to work.

I gladly gave up compiling my own stuff on Gentoo for this, being able to update things within seconds, or waiting an hour for a full source download and compile.. I would rather use SuSE :)

Booting from the NET CD is really easy; just burn it (it's only ~72MB so kind of a waste of a CD, but..) and boot it with

boot suseboot/inst32 language=fr install=http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/opensuse/dist ... 0/repo/oss

Obviously you can do this manually but, this is much quicker by far. It will drag the installation files (~40MB) into memory, mount and begin the installation. Please select a local SuSE mirror for faster operation :)

If you have less than 512MB you'll need to add swap space but it's a Pegasos so you should have no worries. I also found some troubles with "Automatic Configuration" so I turn this off, and go through the extra 3 or 4 steps after the install.

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Matt Sealey

thanks to both of you Matt and Peter for this clear overview and explanations
You just gave me the wish to switch to Suse, or at least to give it a chance ;-) That will be a great occupation for the forthcoming weekend.
I'll report things here.

thx !

after a bit of struggling (for some weird reason, i wasn't able to install any recent linux distro, Suse 11.0 or Ubuntu8.04 if my second HD, which is dedicated to linux systems, was plugged on the second IDE channel...) i managed to run the suse installer, following peter's way by copying the 4 files to an ext3 partition (sorry Matt, the netinstall CD never worked, it froze the pegasos when starting the inst32 here).
Unfortunately, after hours of waiting (i have a very slow dsl line) the installer crashed at 77%.

I'm installing ubuntu now, i hope i can find some time to try Suse again later.

SoundSquare: do you still have the content of your failed SuSE installation? If yes, please make a tgz/zip of your /var/log/YaST2 directory (where the installation logs go), so I can take a look at it.

BTW: if you installed from http://download.opensuse.org/ , then it might have been caused a server failure. There was some down time due to a power failure at SuSE headquarters: http://news.opensuse.org/2008/10/10/pow ... e-located/

Ubuntu: should work nicely on the Pegasos, but on the EFIKA it can't even start XFCE without heavy swapping...

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

I didn't keep the suse installation i'm sorry. It seems like the failure doesn't come from the Suse installation but is more serious. I could install Ubuntu but i can't start it, the kernel loads and sometimes i can reach the GDM screen, but not always. I experience some weird behaviour on this Pegasos. The IDE led get stuck while loading then the whole machine crashes (HD led staying on and HD stopping loading, then i have no other choice to so a hard reset or power it off).
I tried with 3 different HDs but i still have some strange lockups. Sometimes it happens while loading gnome, sometimes earlier while loading hardware drivers.
I keep investigating on it, i hope the board doesn't have a hardware issue.

I don't have any problem with MorphOS though.

if you like there is CRUX PPC too.

CRUX PPC 2.4rc4 works fine on Pegasos2.

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acrux _at_ linuxmail _dot_ org

thanks !

i finally installed Debian Lenny. That's the only distro that works without any kind of tweaking/patches, download the CD, launch the "pegasos" image and there you go (i was surprised to see they still support the pegasos, even in beta/testing releases).
I'd still like to try suse but can't install it, the peg freezes during install. Ubuntu doesn't have network support/module anymore (with the kernel made by Peter), and crux is a bit too "rough" for me (i'm not a linux hardcore fan).
I have serious thoughts about something going wrong with my IDE on this pegasos. Dunno if it can be fixed.

thank to all of you for the useful help

A couple of them HAVE Pegasos boards :D

Hopefully SuSE 11.1 will work without any weird patches. SuSE 11.0 works great except it doesn't make kernels properly (I am not sure you even get this feature on Debian either). SuSE 11.1 will have the same problem unless we we convince them to fix it in the bootloader module.

However, not being able to use the "ppc" bootloader is a vendor problem, we decided, therefore we have to fix it and provide the fix in a DUD. That fixes installation. I am not entirely sure how we can fix an installed system going through multiple kernel updates where the DUD is not used..

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Matt Sealey

it does i can confirm it :) i had a kernel update yesterday and the vmlinuz image got generated automatically. I could boot and use it without a problem.