Adélie Linux

[Roland]

There is still one Linux distro which has not yet been 'tamed' to be used with our X5000: Adélie Linux! (see https://www.adelielinux.org/) There is both 64 and 32 bit PPC versions, but only the 32 bit one works without altivec.

I did some preliminary testing with the 32 bit Adelie... The 'Full rootfs' can be booted with our ordinary kernels, and logged in ('root', password 'live'). But I did not find any desktop from it (lightdm and startx did not do anything), and was not able to test it any further.

The 'Desktop', which is a 'live' .iso image, is in mac format which X5000's U-Boot does not support. I did try to bypass this by copying the contents of it to a FAT partition and tried to boot it from there, but this time bootm refused to start the included kernel ("Wrong Image Format for bootm command") and the initrd.pcc ("Wrong Ram disk Image Format"). Dead-end...

So, it seems Adélie works at least at basic level with X5000, but it is above my skills to install it properly. Probably the easiest way would be to instal it first to a PPC Mac which can use directly the 'Live' media and the included installer with graphical front end, and then simply transfer the resulting root file system to X5000. Unfortunately I do not have such machine at hands...

If there is anyone around here who has the needed equipment/skills and time to 'adjust' Amélie to X5000, please continue from this .

PS. In the package listing there was mentioned Firefox 68.0.10 ESR. If it really works, it would probably be the best Linux browser available for X5000 so far. The "Wicknix" one's are already hopelessly outdated...

[Roland]

Some progress with Amelie... I has been able to take the following steps (using terminal commands) with the root filesystem:

- got network working (only the onboard eth0 so far, which means continous unplugging-replugging :-/)

- got the apk configured and can now install software packages

- got sddm installed and loging screen loaded (manually from boot-terminal)

Now the problem with sddm is that keyboard and mouse are not working at all with it, and loging is impossible! Obviously some configuration problem...

Could some of the wise guys here please tell, how to get sddm to work with keyboard and mouse? I have no earier experience of it.

[xeno74]

Hi Roland,

Many thanks for testing and for reporting results of using Adélie Linux. Very interesting!
Unfortunately I don’t have time for testing it currently.

I will also test it in the future.

Cheers,
Christian

[Roland]

Many thanks for testing and for reporting results of using Adélie Linux. Very interesting!
Unfortunately I don’t have time for testing it currently.

I have slightly advanced with Adélie... I can now try to open desktop via sddm, but so far I get, if using 'Mate', just black screen and a pointer, or with 'Xfce' either a black (with 'fbdev') or a strongly corrupted (with 'radeon') screen. Mouse buttons does not have effect in any case.

Can you say from your previous experience, where could this kind of problem arise and suggest what to try next to solve it?

[Roland]

World premier: Adélie Linux 1.0-rc2 with KDE Plasma desktop running on X5000 .

[xeno74]

World premier: Adélie Linux 1.0-rc2 with KDE Plasma desktop running on X5000 .

This is great! Thanks for the screenshot!

[Skateman]

Nice work Roland!!!

[xeno74]

FYI: Adélie Linux 1.0-BETA5 Released

Illegal command errors can occur with the X5000 (QorIQ P series hardware).

[Roland]

FYI: Adélie Linux 1.0-BETA5 Released

Illegal command errors can occur with the X5000 (QorIQ P series hardware).

Found finally a few moments to test the 1.0-BETA5... No problems with the installation (starting from the 'full rootfs'), but not much new compared to the previous RC2 published a few months earlier. This is really still BETA as many standard productivity tools are missing or broken.

KDE environment is already quite stable, and you can now select the national keyboard layouts, too. Mate desktop is still quite rudimentary, e.g. many settings tools are totally missing or working only partially. New user accounts must be created from KDE preferences. In order too log as 'root' from the SDDM screen the sddm.conf must be edited. Unless, the root account is not shown.

Netsurf 3.10 is currently the only www-browser available for 32-bit PPC Adelie. The settings must be edited from MATE as under KDE Netsuf is closing itself if the settings are opened.

[xeno74]

Found finally a few moments to test the 1.0-BETA5... No problems with the installation (starting from the 'full rootfs'), but not much new compared to the previous RC2 published a few months earlier. This is really still BETA as many standard productivity tools are missing or broken.

KDE environment is already quite stable, and you can now select the national keyboard layouts, too. Mate desktop is still quite rudimentary, e.g. many settings tools are totally missing or working only partially. New user accounts must be created from KDE preferences. In order too log as 'root' from the SDDM screen the sddm.conf must be edited. Unless, the root account is not shown.

Netsurf 3.10 is currently the only www-browser available for 32-bit PPC Adelie. The settings must be edited from MATE as under KDE Netsuf is closing itself if the settings are opened.

Thanks for your report!