Re: Problems with 32 bit PPC upgrading/autoremoving on '04 iBook G4

[Riccardo Mottola]

H Fritz,


Fritz Hudnut wrote:

Adrian:

Just providing feedback on the Debian Sid/PPC install that I ran a 
couple months back and then today did an apt dist-upgrade that brought 
in 489 packages.  Because the machine has a 933 MHz cpu it doesn't do 
anything too fast, but it did get through the installation of 432MB of 
data in about an hour, but there were some errors . . . .  I guess it 
installed the 6.5 kernel, but then did not dpkg it for use, then it 
showed that 6.3 kernel is "to be removed" but numerous attempts to 
remove it have failed . . . .  I forgot to check uname -a??? for 
running kernel.  Problems with grubieee1275 also, although a grub 
window opens and boots the system OK . . . .  And then an issue with 
linux-image-powerpc as well have the dist-upgrade error out.




I think you need to share your errors. They way you described, it is 
difficult to understand.
Perhaps your boot partition is too small and a second new kernel can't 
be fitted on it?


While upgrading, I prefer a safer method, which conusmes more disk 
space. First I do "apt-get upgrade", reboot and test, then "apt-get 
dist-upgrade" and then "apt-get autoremove".


I was hoping that I could use the machine as a distributed.net 
 "mule" to just slowly kick out some stats, 
for hours and see how that would work.




I remember when running seti and distributed.net with NetBSD on a MacII 
with 68020 with FPU...


But the provided "web browser" is that epiphany?? launches briefly and 
then crashes.  Tried that a couple times.  I tried to install 
"firefox" via console and that had so many unmet dependencies that 
failed, and same for "chromium" . . . no candidate.


No way you can expect to use firefox or chromium on such computer, just 
because of the RAM! I don't know how chromium fares, I try to avoid it, 
but firefox is a big monstrum not very big-endina friendly nowadays, but 
remember that also the web pages have become heavier in 20 years: CSS, 
JS, layers, compositing, videos with backgrounds...


For "quick" access you can browse with things like midori, or try your 
luck with ArcticFox (there is no official deb package though)




So, there is a GUI, but somewhere in there the kernel got botched 
up??  or the machine can't support 6.5?? and won't remove 6.3 . . . 
the machine is very slow in spec, not sure if I could wget the right 
distributed.net  "ppc" package and install it 
via console . . . .  Ran out of time to mess with it, the lack of a 
browser kind of cuts down on usefulness, but had that problem with the 
OSX 10.4 install that was on there and the possibly Lubuntu 16.04???  
browsers were almost dysfunctional . . . I think it has 946 MB RAM???  
Don't think it has enough kick to run your SidsterPPC system??


A computer is not just for browsing... and your iBook can do linux, 
since I also have a G3 iBook and G4 iBook.
Email (with a client, not webmail), image viewing, mp3 music, even some 
image editing can be done Simple text processing, coding...
Just don't expect YouTube in a browser, although you might be able to 
watch videos with VLC or similar.


A useful trick is to hook up ssh/telnet/whatever and do browsing on 
another system and then copy links and wget them



Riccardo

Re: ghc: FTBFS haskell-random powerpc (ghc Segmentation fault)

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

Hi!

Note that this issue also prevents us from building the latest version of the
GHC compiler [1]. I have tried to cross-compile GHC 9.4.6 to work around this
issue and also tried building an unregisterised compiler. Both without success.

I have forwarded the issue upstream [2]. I think the only way forward will be to
bisect the problem unless a GHC expert can figure out what the problem is.

Adrian

> [1] https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=ghc&suite=sid
> [2] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/23969

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
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