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FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions

For general questions about CRUX please first read the CRUX x86 main site’s documentation page and wiki.

Q: What did it mean to be a LinuxPPC system?
A: In 1999 the LinuxPPC Developers have developed the Reference Release as a basis for other PowerPC Linux distributions. This release was not intended for general use but as a set of common software to be used by Linux distributors as the basis of their PowerPC products.
Read more about the LinuxPPC history from Gate Crashing Org.

Q: What does it mean to be a Power Architecture based machine?
A: The POWER (Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC) Architecture, originally developed by IBM, was introduced with the RISC System/6000 product family in early 1990. In 1991, Apple, IBM, and Motorola, known as the AIM alliance, began the collaboration to evolve to the PowerPC Architecture, expanding the architecture's applicability. In 1997, Motorola and IBM began another collaboration focused on optimizing PowerPC for embedded systems. At the end of 2004, the Power.org consortium was launched with the goal of developing community specifications and supporting development tools that work together to facilitate integration and enhanced implementations focused on the Power Architecture.
The Power Architecture is an open architecture defined by the Power Instruction Set Architecture (Power ISA) maintained by the Power Architecture Advisory Council, which ensures compatibility among implementations and allows anyone to design and fabricate Power Architecture-compliant processors.

Q: Will CRUX PPC run on my Apple G3/G4 iMac/iBook/PowerBook/PowerMac/Xserve?
A: Yes. Hardware support is almost full on this kind of platform. Neither 3D graphics acceleration nor hardware suspend/sleep will work on Nvidia GPU equipped computers. Motorola modems won’t work, Conexant modems will work (32bit only). There are some known issues with some PowerMac G4 FireWire controllers (PCILynx).

Q: Will CRUX PPC run on my Apple G5 iMac/PowerMac/Xserve?
A: Yes. CRUX PPC will run on 64bit PowerPC hardware with 32/64 multilib and 64bit kernel.

Q: Will CRUX PPC run on my IBM pSeries server?
A: Yes. CRUX PPC will run on 64bit POWER hardware with 32/64 multilib and 64bit kernel but we are looking forward to receive feedback/collaboration about these platforms. To increase CRUX PPC usability on pSeries, starting from CRUX PPC 2.5 we do provide ports for some IBM utils.

Q: Will CRUX PPC run on my Genesi EFIKA or G3/G4 PegasosII?
A: Yes. CRUX PPC runs on both PegasosII and Efika. Some luck has been reported with PegasosI too (link). The very smart firmware of these machines allows you to boot and install in many ways, or use the pre-built flash-drive systems. See the HowTOs and the Download sections for more infos.

Q: Will CRUX PPC run on my ACube SAM4x0?
A: Yes. CRUX PPC runs on SAM440ep from the first release of the board to the public at Pianeta Amiga 2007. CRUX PPC 2.4 was the first release to be bootable on Sam440ep.
There isn't yet a full linux kernel support for the Sam460ex but CRUX PPC 2.7a is already capable to boot it.

Q: Will CRUX PPC run on my PowerPC based game console?
A: No, not yet. We hope it will in future, when we’ll have time and hardware to start this adventure. Again any sort of contribution (time, knowledge, hardware) to the project is welcome. Anyway we don't like very much the idea to build a distro for a console game not a real computer.

Q: How much effort will it take to get a fully functional CRUX PPC system that i can use for home, office, study, development, server or anything else? How much effort does it take to keep it updated?
A: As you can read on the sites, CRUX and CRUX PPC are targeted to the experienced Linux user. An user with average experience and fast internet connection will take some days to set up a general-purpose workstation system comfortable enough in daily usage. A server system might take less time but more attention.
After the initial setup, CRUX PPC will be really easy to keep updated, and new software installation will be a pleasure either.
If you’re not familiar with a *NIX and GNU/Linux system, you will have the chance to learn a lot, but you will need some extra patience. To set up CRUX PPC properly you will have to get somehow familiar with PowerPC hardware too.

Q: Why is development so slow? are you guys sleeping or what? Do you need help, new developers and contributors?
A: CRUX PPC is a completely volunteered project, none of the developers ever received a dime for the work made on the project, and even if it’s interesting to support as much hardware as possible, each piece of hardware we receive is just extra work and yet another thing to take care of. Few developers, lots of hardware to support, and our work/studies/private lives don’t allow faster developement. Anyway we’re setting up our own servers (directly maintained by us). Contributors, ports, documentation, feedback and any sort of help is welcome; new developers familiar with CRUX, CRUX PPC and Power Architecture hardware are encouraged to join us.

Q: I updated the openfirmware and i have a non-apple keyboard attached to my Mac. Pressing “C” during the boot chimes won’t cause it to boot from cd-rom, as it used to do with older openfirmware version. How do I boot from cd-rom now?
A: This has been reported on some iMac G3 models. You should enter the OpenFirmware pressing the command-alt-O-F keys (command is the apple key or windows key on pc-style keyboards) during the boot chimes and keeping them pressed until you see the openfirmware’s white screen with release information and promt. Now insert the CRUX PPC cd and type exactly this:

boot cd:,\\:tbxi

at the openfirmware’s prompt. Your Mac should then boot from cd and yaboot prompt should query you for the boot kernel to use.

Q: Shortly after booting the installation cdrom of CRUX PPC, i get “Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0) “. What’s happening?
A: This can happen if you have more than one CD-ROM drive. Make sure you boot from then "first" CD-ROM drive, i.e. /dev/cdrom. If you must boot from a different drive (i.e. not the first one) you can still do that but you have to add root=/dev/hdn at the yaboot prompt (cdrom1 indicates that it is the second drive, cdrom2 that it is the third, and so on).
Older releases of CRUX PPC used devfs, that was handled by the kernel. With devfs you could just call the cdrom /dev/cdrom without having to care about its position on the ide/scsi bus. CRUX PPC from 2.2 release uses udev, that does the same things better, but it’s run after the kernel boots. So CRUX PPC install cd has root=/dev/hdc hardwired into it for 32bit machines, as it suits most systems. If your cdrom is located differently on the ide or scsi bus, you should tell the kernel where to find it; when you come to selecting the kernel (this varies from Apple to PegasosII to IBM CHRP) append

root=/dev/«hdx»

to the kernel string, and choose «hdx» between hda, hdb, hdc, hdd,… sr0, sr1,…
The Apple iBook G3 has only one ATA bus then your cdrom is a primary slave and you have to add root=/dev/hdb
Also note that, as CRUX PPC 2.7 uses new pata drivers, all the disks are now seen as scsi, so what used to be hda will now be sda, and the cdrom will be sr0 and if you still experience any problems booting then try adding rootdelay=15 or more .

Q: How do i resize my existing MacOS X partition?
A: You can resize your HFS and HFS+ partitions with parted; you can run parted from the CRUX PPC install CD (unfortunately it’s missing by error on 2.2alpha). Before resizing the partition you need to turn off journaling from MacOS X; sometimes it will refuse to do it from the graphical interface, so you will need to enable it (even if it’s already enabled) and then disable it from the root shell; please refer to this article on ubuntuforums for accurate step-by-step how-to.

Q: Sound doesn’t work, and alsaconf says that no card is installed on my Mac…
A: The sound card on Macs is connected through the I2C or I2S bus, not the PCI bus. You will not see the card listed when viewing the PCI bus or when using alsaconf.

Q: Suspend is not working on my system, why?
A: If you go scrubbing the Linux Kernel Mailing List, you’ll discover that suspend is intentionally disabled in the Linux kernel when an Nvidia GPU is found; this is because there is no known way to wake the chip up on PowerPC, without a bios call. So please thank Nvidia about this and be patient while kernel developers fix this issue.

Q: How do i make my Airport or Airport Extreme working?
A: How-To about Airport and Airport Extreme are available in Documentation, they needs to be adjusted a bit but it’s a good reference.
If you find any problems please try to change your firmware; some versions of the firmware might require to run insmod/modprobe twice as the first time firmware load will fail, some other will not correctly handle rate auto-adjustment and setting rate by hand is recommended, some others will pretend to work with WEP (with classic iwconfig syntax) but won’t eventually work, some others will just do wep… So if something is not working, first try to switch firmwares…

Q: Do I have any hope to get the modem built into my Mac working? Will it work at reduced performance?
A: Motorola SM56k modems found on recent iBooks/PowerBooks won’t work. Apple switched from USB to I2S in the middle of 2004. Every model revision since then has had I2S as the interface to a modem module that contains only a data pump and a DAA interface to the telephone line.
Earlier Conexant modems, instead, are detected as USB devices and will work (see the hcfmodem port in ppc/opt repo). Thanks to an old agreement between Apple and Linuxant these modems will operate at full speed with the free driver, no need to buy the commercial version.

Q: Bluetooth modules loaded correctly into the kernel but hcitool keep saying that “Device is not available: No such device”. Why?
A: Involved kernel modules are “bluetooth” and “btusb”. First of all get sure that bluez is installed; if not, install it. If you’re using iBook/PowerBook internal bluetooth device, it might be in hid mode. To turn it to hci mode you need to enable it in /etc/rc.d/bluez:

HID2HCI_ENABLE="true"

Now you’re ready to run hcitool, rfcomm and so on, but be sure that hcid is running…

Q: The {acroread,firefox-flash-plugin,$your_favourite_binary_port} port installed successfully, but it’s not working, what’s wrong?
A: You have tried to install binaries for a different architecture.

Q: Installation process works effortlessly but the SmartFirmware/U-Boot is unable to read (and boot) the content of the ext2 partitions, how can i do?
A: If you're using a PegasosI/II system, an EFIKA or a Sam440ep board, you should use parted to create an Amiga partition table; the partition where the kernel image resides should be a primary one and formatted as ext2 with 128-byte inodes (mkfs.ext2 -I 128) because the SmartFirmware and U-Boot only supports 128-byte inodes. Latest mkfs.ext2 create 256-byte inodes by default to make ext4fs work in the future.

Q: Gnash is too unstable/incomplete for me, but i need flash! What can i do?
A: Complain to Macromedia/Adobe and support indeed the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

Q: I need to access contents created for Microsoft Silverlight! What can I do?
A: Moonlight is an open source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight for Unix systems. With Moonlight you can access videos, applications and content created for Silverlight on Linux. We are working to provide a full working and stable port.

Q: Where do i find a working Java VM for Linux/PowerPC?
A: We encourage you to use and develop over a entirely free (as freedom) java implementation like GNU java and classpath or IcedTea. But if you need other Sun compatible java and classpath you only have one choice: IBM java for linux-ppc. You’d need a special IBM developer’s license to use/download them; our jre and jdk ports are located in the ppc/opt repository.

Q: Will OpenOffice run on linux/powerpc? Where do i find a port to install it in the comfortable way?
A: Yes, it will: we do have a quick binary port that will install our own OpenOffice pre-compiled package. If your ppc/opt ports tree is up to date you will find it.

Q: I have a revision A or B iMac. I've replaced the hard drive with a larger one and now I unable to boot!
A: There is an 8GB limit for the root partition on these machines (Openfirmware 1.x). Ensure that your root partition is less than 8GB and it should work as expected. This also applies to OS X and later versions of OS 9.

Q: When I rebooted, yaboot didn't work! How can I fix this?
A: It's a misconfigured yaboot.conf. A way to fix this is to boot the CRUX PPC cd again, mount your crux ppc root partition and check yaboot.conf for errors. You'll also need to run ybin -v -C /mnt/etc/yaboot.conf to update the boot loader once you have finished. This can all be done without chrooting back into your install.

Q: I installed yaboot on PReP hardware. How can I verify this?
A: To verify that yaboot.chrp has been copied to the PReP partition (e.g. /dev/sda1):

# dd if=/dev/sda1 count=10 | grep ELF
Binary file (standard input) matches
10+0 records in
10+0 records out

A match signifies that yaboot was installed correctly.

Q: When I try to boot, yaboot only says "read error"! Why can't I boot?
A: You're probably using XFS for your root partition. To ensure that your kernel will boot, instead of copying the vmlinux file to /boot, simply cat the kernel as shown below:

# cat /usr/src/linux/vmlinux > /boot/vmlinux

While this is an option, yaboot has some issues accessing files with holes.

Q: How allow setting of RTC when it contains invalid data?
A: In some cases the date/time stored in an RTC can be corrupted, eg due to loss of power, before its been initially set, etc. When this occurs the RTC_RD_TIME ioctl can fail since the Linux kernel determines that the RTC contains invalid data. Currently, when setting an RTC using hwclock, hwclock performs a number of RTC_RD_TIME ioctls before setting the RTC. When one of these ioctls fails, hwclock bombs out and the corrupted RTC data can't be overwritten.
hwclock --utc --noadjfile --set --date="11/23/10 17:19:00" currently works to fix a corrupted RTC, but a user couldn't determine this without digging through the source code.

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Page last modified on January 27, 2012, at 01:31 AM