Fienix - New PowerPC Distro

[Skateman]

@kilaueabart
Copy the Xorg.conf from your ubuntu verson to Fienix and reboot! Your black screen wil turn into a fienix login screen.

[UserH]

It's looking good so far Casey!

Also.. I don't know what else you've done behind the scenes.. But Blender 2.43 can now be used.. Without the interface messing up anymore! I've no idea if it might be to do with the fact I'm using a custom build of version 5.3.3 of the Linux kernel of Power Progress Community though.. I could get my X5000 system working again and see if it works on both systems.. Though I'd need to nick some DDR3 memory from another machine to do so.

I also manged to the get Blender 2.82 installed.. After a bit of extra fiddling to.. It will actually launch this time.. Without throwing a seg fault.. Though complains my graphics hardware doesn't support OpenGL 3.. Which I KNOW it should do.. Guess we have to wait for more up to date versions of Mesa 3D to support OGL 3?

[kilaueabart]

@kilaueabart
Copy the Xorg.conf from your ubuntu verson to Fienix and reboot! Your black screen wil turn into a fienix login screen.

Thank you so much for that! I copied it to the first version of soar, on disk, rather than to the usb newer soar that didn't log anything when I tried it. Very strange. Came up with a sunset scene and an alert in the middle: "Failed to run Redshift/Gamma vamp size too small: 0/Failed to start adjustment method randr." But it looks like I will be able to use Fienix again, after months of just wishing!
I am doing this from fienix now. Fortunately I was able to find my password list on MATE from here and log in via Interweb browser.
I wanted to add a screen dump, but "Sorry, the board attachment quota has been reached."

[Skateman]

@kilaueabart
Have you also disabled Compton as Christion mentioned in a few posts before... i have due to having an SI Radeon card in my machine which does not support hardware accelration. R7 250.

Hi Casey,

I removed Compton in the QEMU Serial0 console with "apt-get remove compton" and after that I restarted LightDM with "systemctl restart lightdm". Now, I can login to the default Fienix desktop in the virtual e5500 QEMU machine.

If you got the the fienix login screen... go to a different TTY CTRL-ALT-FN
Remove compton using the apt-get remove compton command as mentioned above. then restart LightDM as mentioned above.

[kilaueabart]

The Xorg.conf and Compton fixes worked so I could log on to my original winter 2018-19 fienix (/dev/sda7) and on my first Fienix 2.0 soar (/dev/sda6). I decided to replace the old soar with the new one and apply the same fix. I stupidly confused the addresses (wouldn't the higher sda number be the newer one?) and replaced the original fienix with the new soar.

When I booted the new soar, I got an alert about shortage of space, and realized I forgot to resize. Back to Ubuntu and GParted, but the attempt to resize got an error message with the details

Code: Select all

e2fsck 1.42.13 (17-May-2015)
/dev/sda7 has unsupported feature(s): metadata_csum
e2fsck: Get a newer version of e2fsck!

apt-get upgrade e2fsck couldn't find e2fsck. Next I tried

Code: Select all

bart@X5000:~$ sudo resize2fs /dev/sda7
resize2fs 1.42.13 (17-May-2015)
resize2fs: Filesystem has unsupported read-only feature(s) while trying to open /dev/sda7
Couldn't find valid filesystem superblock.

After a lot more trial and error I now have three working ext4 partitions of fienix 2.0 soar, all with a space shortage:

Code: Select all

/dev/sda6  FIENIX-DISK  97.93 GiB  3.40 GiB 267.63 MiB 
/dev/sda7  FIENIX-DISK 100.95 GiB  3.40 GiB 267.63 MiB 
/dev/sdb   FIENIX-DISK  29.81 GiB  3.41 GiB 261.06 MiB

Some very strange arithmetic in those figures!

Any way out of this mess?

[Skateman]

@kilaueabart

The log of gparted will show you that the versions of the utils to resize are outdated... i had the same issues. I had to download and make new versions.
I will put them somewhere so you can download these. Will be later today...

[caseycullen]

Could someone fill me in: is Xorg.conf required if you have an SI GPU? I don't have an SI card to test so I have no experience with this. What are the parameters that the Xorg.conf needs in order to boot?
-Casey

[kilaueabart]

What I wrote from Ubuntu this morning is no longer true! Yesterday I was able to boot the soar desktop from three sources. Today the harddrive sources get me the log-on screen, and after I log on a file cabinet drawer and a (browser) world image icon show briefly on the upper left side, but they disappear and I am left with a cursor arrow.
I was able to boot to desktop from my flash drive source, but I couldn't run the browser or the system monitor.
Aargh!

[Skateman]

@kilauebart

To resize you partitions i had to compile a later version of the resize tools. Here the link https://drive.google.com/file/d/1C6znBx ... sp=sharing
Gparted will assume the executables needed are in the SBIN folder if i remember correct.

The black screen after the login has to do with compton. You must remove this for now.

[Skateman]

Could someone fill me in: is Xorg.conf required if you have an SI GPU? I don't have an SI card to test so I have no experience with this. What are the parameters that the Xorg.conf needs in order to boot?
-Casey

Hi Casey,

This is the Xorg that makes the SI graphicscard users able to boot up fienix.
The fbdev is the trick...as there are no radeon drivers that support the SI cards on the PPC platform.


Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Device0"
Driver "fbdev"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Device0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection