I have finally tried Ubuntu. I downloaded the CD about the same time everyone else was installing it but I’ve only just sorted out the boot and partition problems on my G5 which means I could ditch the old Yellowdog 3 installation.
It has all been a bit of a farce. I initially installed Yellowdog because it had G5 support before anyone else. Unfortunately being yellow doesn’t stop it from being a dog. Redhat 9.0 (on which it is based) was my second most hated Redhat distro (after Redhat 8.0), Yellowdog didn’t change this belief. So, after a while, I experimented with a Fedora ppc64 distribution. This unfortunately was designed for IBM machines and so it didn’t have a yaboot package. The end result is that I was using the Yellowdog to control the boot process, but Fedora for actual work. Not pretty, but it got worse.
Now I installed Debian. Surely, you say, Debian can’t have any problems. True, it almost worked. Except that it tried to load a module for the soundblaster Live card I’d thrown into the machine to try and get sound out of it. The machine hangs at this point for reasons I have never resolved. So, rather than removing the card, I booted one of the Fedora kernels to run the Debian distro. So: Yellowdog sets up yaboot, Fedora provides the kernel and Debian provides everything else. Got that ?
It gets worse. Debian upgraded the kernel, but failed to write the initrd image. The old kernel and initrd image then got deleted. The reason it failed to write the initrd image is because of a lack of /proc/scsi. But my Fedora install didn’t have that kernel option due to it not compiling with it on ppc64. This is also the problem that stops yaboot running on the Fedora install. So now the Debian images are unbootable, even when I got around to taking the sound card out. I’m also out of partitions for new distros.
So this is how it sat for the last two months. It did work after a fashion. So on Sunday morning I finally got sick of it. After half an hour I discover that the yellowdog kernel can’t be used to boot anything but yellowdog, so yellowdog is still the only way I can change the boot parameters and I can’t make a Debian initrd image with yellowdog (well, that would probably be feasible, but I don’t know the magic). Next I try booting Debian without the initrd image, oops not enough drivers to actually do anything useful, like mounting the root partition. Finally I find the section of mkinitrd which autodetects the scsi modules, replace it with a single line that writes out the correct answer and I have a initrd image.
Reboot, run ybin, reboot again to make sure it all still works, copy all the important data off the yellowdog partition and shove the Ubuntu CD in the drive. The Ubuntu installation took four more hours because of all the updates it had to drag down over my crappy 128kb/s line, but it was worth it. I particularly like the chocolate colour they use for the background. Mmm, chocolate.