lubuntu-qa team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Marsden <jmarsden@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 05/27/2013 07:57 PM, Phill Whiteside wrote:

> As the ppc-bios is in .deb format, and my server
> runs .yum it was suggested that the binary of ppc-bios could be
> extracted from a debian based system and inserted into a yum based
> system.

(1) On a local Ubuntu/Lubuntu/Debian machine, do

  wget -c
http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/o/openbios-ppc/openbios-ppc_1.0+svn1060-1_all.deb
  sudo dpkg -i openbios-ppc_1.0+svn1060-1_all.deb

and then copy the file /usr/share/openbios/openbios-ppc (use scp, or
filezilla, or whatever you prefer!) up to the big server in the sky :)

(2) Alternatively, you could grab the .deb onto the CentOS machine and
extract it there, doing something like

  ar x openbios-ppc_1.0+svn1060-1_all.deb
  tar zxf data.tar.gz

The BIOS is now at usr/share/openbios/openbios-ppc (note: this path is
local to where you typed the commands, *not* /usr/...) so you can copy
it from there to whereever you think it needs to be :)

> If this is possible, 

It is, I just did it on an RH server from work as a test :)

> ... then the issue of the existing processors being slow to compile
> on in emulation should not be a major issue. (The dedi server [1]
> does have a reasonable amount of CPU's behind it).

Well, maybe.  Emulation can slow things by very large factors (like 10x
or 20x).  And compiling a complex browser like Firefox takes a long time
(hours) on real (non-emulated) hardware... I know xombrero is smaller
and lighter, but... we'll have to see.  Anyway, the above two approaches
should get you the PPC BIOS on a RedHat/CentOS server, pick whichever
method you prefer :)

> But, as I said on there, this stuff is beyond my limited capabilities.

You're a trained RHCE... you can do this :)

Meanwhile, I'll dig out my recalcitrant borrowed iBook G4, and see what
I can get it to do for me.  I've just never solved or even fully
understood the (nVidia) video issues it has.  But I can probably install
Raring server well enough to ssh into it, which should be fine for using
it as a PPC build machine for xombrero.

Once I have that... where exactly *is* the xombrero source package we
want to build?

Jonathan