Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

[sopranojam85]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

I'm wondering if the fact that I decided not to configure my internet connection during install has anything to do with it.....

Maybe I'll start over, being sure to configure DHCP during installation. Let's see where that goes

[sopranojam85]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

Good news!

After installing with DHCP configured, I had the same result after the install/reboot of no GUI. But I typed these commands:

sudo aptitude install xserver-xorg-core
sudo aptitude install xubuntu-desktop

Both commands caused large packages to be downloaded and installed. (whereas before it downloaded 0 data and installed 0 data).

I suspect that the "alternate installs" image I used does not have the GUI's pre-installed. Not entirely sure, but that seems to be the case.

The second command is still running, with about 25 minutes left on the download process. I'll let you know the result!

[sopranojam85]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

Install of xubuntu desktop continues to tick away.

Currently saying "Setting up splix (2.0.0-2ubuntu2) ...

Wonder how much longer? It's been installing, clearly not stuck, progressing on different components, for about 3 hours now... time will tell

[sithlord48]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

that thing is old. gonna have to cut it some slack

[sopranojam85]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

Ok, installer finished. But still no GUI upon reboot.

I enter startxfce4 and I have almost vertabim the same text-based failure messages as last time.

Any other ideas? If not, I'm going to give the "standard install" desktop PPC version of xubuntu 9.10 a shot. I'm tired of coaxing this alternate one into doing things.

[dibl]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

Ok, installer finished. But still no GUI upon reboot.

I was afraid of that ... :P

Minimum memory spec for xubuntu is 192MB -- I don't know that your PPC can run video on top of the OS.

I would get some super-light distro like slax or maybe something that runs LXDE, but it really has to be easy on the RAM.

[sithlord48]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

you can try to install the lxde package , it should pull all the stuff it needs... from there you can remove xubuntu-desktop....well xfce4 (cause the meta package will not remove what it installs). and you should get an lxde desktop .... if not try a smaller distro as dibl suggests..

[sopranojam85]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

Great news! I got the Xfce desktop environment working! I manually edited the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file (which was blank by default) I basically manually typed all the lines for the file, exactly as I had it with Breezy Badger. Upon next reboot, it went right into xfce.

It's incredibly slow, as I kinda expected. I think I've been sitting here for 10-15 minutes, still booting. This is encouraging, though.

I will probably be trying different GUIs though. Thanks for the help so far, guys!

[sopranojam85]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

Wanting a clean slate, I went ahead and reinstalled xubuntu 9.10 (using, again, the "alternate" installer CD.) Once I installed, I rebooted and (as expected) the GUI didn't show up. I went ahead and installed LXDE:

sudo aptitude install lxde
sudo aptitude install xorg lxde

This seemed to work. I then opened my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, and manually typed all the data that was in this file that worked last time.

I typed

startx

And almost like magic, there it was - beautiful, speedy and snappy LXDE GUI!

I open the terminal and installed FireFox (since it for some reason wasn't already installed) and once this was finished, I decided to go ahead and reboot. But upon reboot, it automatically tried booting into Xfce! (So it was in fact, preinstalled with my xubuntu CD.) But alas, the login screen was completely unresponsive. No matter what I did, I could not log in, log out, power off, or switch GUIs from here. Control + alt + backspace had no effect and so a force-shut-down was necessary. I rebooted - no change.

I could find no way to boot Ubuntu without the Xfce GUI appearing and failing miserably. The only thing I could think of was to boot to the Xubuntu installer CD (Move the Ram Disk and kernel files out of the way and replace them with the original ones from installation CD, and remove the Linux Kernel arguments, to boot to the CD again from BOot X). Once booted to the installer, I could go Option + F2 to go to a new shell session. I had to add this line to /etc/fstab:

/dev/hda11 / ext4 defaults 1 1

Saved it, and then I changed directories to root, and typed:

mkdir ext4
mount /dev/hda11 ext4 -t ext4

With my main Linux partition finally mounted and accessible, I needed to find a way to make it not boot to Xfce, and the only way I could think of was to put purposeful mistakes in my xorg.conf file.

nano /ext4/etc/X11/xconf.org

And I just made a purposeful mistake in the display section heading and saved it.

From there, I rebooted back into Mac OS 9, and put my ramdisk and kernel back into place as before, and re-added /dev/hda11 into the Kernel arguments box to boot back into Linux. I achieved my end goal this way, and an unsuccessful boot of Ubuntu showed display errors and dropped to a shell. Then, I wanted to remove Xfce.

sudo aptitude remove xubuntu-desktop

This seemed to do a lot of tasks, but did so very quickly.

So I corrected my xorg.conf file and typed startx, and back came my good, quick LXDE desktop.

I rebooted again, but it automatically tried booting to XFCE!

So obviously I either did not proprerly remove XFCE, or something about the boot process is telling Linux to reinstall XFCE. Any ideas? How can I either
-- completely remove xfce, or
-- Configure bootup to load LXDE and not XFCE?

I'm hesitant to try other builds, since very few of them seem to be made for the Power PC processor, so hopefully I can configure this installation.

[sopranojam85]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

Success! To disable that silly broken (GDM?) login screen on every boot, I simply navigated to /etc/X11. There was a file there called preferred-desktop-manager. It only had one line:

/usr/sbin/gdm

I just removed this line, saved it, rebooted, and it booted into the terminal without a GUI. Now I just type startx, and LXDE comes right up. That's good enough for me

Now I'm having fun configuring LXDE. It's pretty snappy.

[dibl]

Re: Installing Breezy Badger on PowerBook 3400c

My hat is off -- nice job! Shows the value of persistence.

FYI, in the coming 10.04 will be the SLiM login manager, a very lightweight "desktop" for stretched hardware. Might work well on yours.