hi all, last week there was an EFIKA user logging on #slackintosh on freenode asking for EFIKA support status, unfortunately I was away from home for the whole week.

So here am I: we want to support EFIKA and other ppc boards on slackintosh but we've no hw, anyone want to help us trying out kernels and installations?

ciao

A question for everyone else's benefit; What's Slackintosh? :)

As for asking if you can go ahead and just do it, and post the results here, you'll get enough interested testers.

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Matt Sealey

i'm surprised you haven't heard about it :)

slackintosh is an unofficial slackware linux port for PPC. Very good distro IMO.

Of course I've heard of it but when presenting something for testing it's best to explain yourself, not just say "is anyone willing to test INSERT PRODUCT NAME HERE" :)

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Matt Sealey

I'm guessing Slackintosh is another linux and nothing to do with MacOS or Mac applications. What's involved in getting it installed on an Efika?

Does anyone else think the Efika would benefit from a 'LiveStick' linux distro? I'm still in the dark as to exactly what e17ka is - maybe it's already there. But I, for one, would like to see any OS that recognizes USB sticks are today what floppy disks were in the '80s. Why go to the effort and expense of adding a harddrive and screwing around with network connections when it's so much more convenient to download onto a USB stick from your primary source of internet goodness (whether that be a Windows/Linux pc or other) and then move that stick over to your Efika?

Yeah we're working on something using Gentoo, but there is a lot else going on which is taking time from it.

Anyone could do this with Debian or Ubuntu right now; the kernel is the sticking point. debootstrap yourself a system and squashfs the result - boot the kernel from the USB stick, mount the USB stick, loop mount the squashfs filesystem from the USB stick as root, et voila. LiveStick.

However it's very time consuming. I'm focussing on Gentoo simply because it has very useful tools to do all this, specifically a build system for apps (catalyst) and the kernel (genkernel) which can be nicely automated and spit out a complete system for you, we can tweak the profiles and make whole new systems from scratch which meet any need.

If anyone wants to contribute something, it would be nice if we had a Gentoo kernel (built with genkernel) which would boot the livecd image. You can download any Gentoo PPC CD (minimal or universal) and grab the live image from it - it's a single file. With that file on whatever media you choose (FAT32 USB stick, for you) you can boot into a Gentoo system and go from stage3 right there. That's the start of it for everyone.. it's harder to build apps for a Linux distro you can't run than any other way.

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Matt Sealey

whoa, everyone chill out please!

I'm just trying to get some contacts with whoever joined the irc channel some time ago: he said he has an efika board so I think he probably read those forums.
As told in my first post we have no efika/genesi/whatsoever hw to test on so we simply do not support anything about the powermac architecture, until someone shows up (like happened last week) with will to help us we can't do anything.

It's kind of chicken and egg problem so, as I had this opportunity to get someone with right hw and I miss it as I was away from home, I'm just trying to get back in touch with him. Leave any linux distribution holy wars out of here, please.

Is the Slackintosh community more open to hardware
outside of Apple's nowadays?

If I'm not mistaken, a friend of mine, Johan Gulldén,
tried to get it running on his Pegasos 2. But he had
to make his own fork which he named SlackPPC. The
Slackintosh community wouldn't help him.

This was three years ago, so my memory could be playing
tricks with me, but I'm fairly sure I got it right..

Something like this?

@nixnut - that is great. Let us try it. Thanks.

R&B :)

P.S. Matt says you have been doing a lot of very good work.

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

I never have used the Russel Kroll Slackintosh 8.1 (except when trying to bring life back into the project), so I just can't say how was the community before. I can however assure you that now we're open to external contribution (otherwise I wouldn't come in asking for the misterious nick and EFIKA support, do I? ;-) )
I never heard of him, a quick google search on "SlackPPC" shows links from year 2000, so it's over 5 year older than newer Slackintosh (me and Adrian start working together in 2004, Slackintosh 10.1 came out in 2005). I'm a bit sad about the old fork: those situations just doesn't help any community.

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Slackintosh Linux Project Developer: http://www.slackintosh.org
Linux-live for powerpc: http://www.slackintosh.org/pub/rsync/mb/linux-live
My webstuff: http://sidbox.homelinux.org

My GnuPG key id: 0x86A91047

He worked on it in 2004. So any links from 2000 are not his.
I don't think he ever publically released it, really. He got into
a nice game programming school which he focuses on to 100%.

this explains lots of things: I start working privately on slackintosh in late 2003 - mid 2004 when the russel kroll version was long dead and there was almost no community. no wonder they didn't help your friend: the old project came to a full stop.

_________________
Slackintosh Linux Project Developer: http://www.slackintosh.org
Linux-live for powerpc: http://www.slackintosh.org/pub/rsync/mb/linux-live
My webstuff: http://sidbox.homelinux.org

My GnuPG key id: 0x86A91047

Yeah but without the "rename everything as 8.3" silliness, would be nice :)

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Matt Sealey

Hehe, yeah it would. But 'everything'?? It's just one file (ok, that's still 33%) and only on fat filesystems. :D