Thursday, October 15, 2009

Fedora 11 on PPC Mac Mini

When I needed to set up a monitoring station for our developers, I found an old G4 (PowerPC architecture) Mac Mini in the office that was simply gathering dust.

While the rest of the office Macs were being either upgraded or freshly installed with Snow Leopard, it wouldn't be possible on this little device, as the PowerPC architecture isn't supported by the latest release of their operating system. I could have installed the previous iteration of OS X, Leopard, but I decided to have a crack at installing a Linux distro on the machine.

My work-supplied laptop is a MacBook Pro that I have configured as a dual boot machine; OS X and Fedora 11 are the two options presented by rEFIt when I power it on. Additionally, we use CentOS 5.x as our primary hosting platform and I consider myself a Red Hat man, so I opted to go with the PPC version of Fedora 11. I downloaded the PPC net installation ISO image and began. Unfortunately, the installation wasn't without difficulty, as I'll explain.

Display Issues

When I first attempted to boot the installation disk, I held down the "c" key on the keyboard to boot from the optical drive and I was presented with the Linux bootloader. I hit return to continue and, after some information about available memory was printed to the screen, the display went completely blank. I could still hear the disk being accessed, so this was clearly a problem with the display driver.

I hit CTRL+ALT+DEL, which the installer gracefully caught and restarted the machine. But, after holding down the "c" key again, the machine wouldn't display the bootloader; instead I just had a blank screen! Worried that I might have damaged the graphics card, I rebooted the machine again, this time letting it boot into the existing OS X install. No white screen and Apple logo appeared and for a short while I thought I was going to have to simply label the device as "bricked". However, the OS X log in screen eventually appeared and I breathed a sigh of relief!

After a few more attempts at booting the Fedora install disc, each failing to display anything, I tried a Debian PPC install CD, which gave similar results. I can't remember why I thought to attempt this next step, but it appeared to work: I completely unplugged the Mini from it's PSU and left it for a few minutes. When I came back to it, I was able to boot off the installation media and see the boot loader. I tried to launch the Debian installer, but this had the same problem of failing to render anything to the display.

I tried booting the installer several times, using various options to alter the output to the monitor; for example, disabling the framebuffer, forcing a low resolution, etc. However, none of these appeared to work either.

I was actually thinking of giving up attempting to install a Linux distro on the machine when I had another thought: I had up until now been connecting to the monitor (a ViewSonic VG2030wm) using a DVI cable. So I tried using the, older, VGA connection to the monitor, which required the use of an Apple DVI-to-VGA adaptor as the Mac Mini only has a DVI output on the rear.

To my surprise, this actually worked! The initial bootloader appeared at a much lower resolution, however, when I hit return to begin installation the system managed to display the installer.

I actually still had the Debian media in the machine, so I ran through a basic installation of Debian to see if I could actually get it to boot into a working OS. This was successful and I managed to log into the Gnome desktop without any problem.

LVM Issues

I was still determined to install Fedora 11 on the box, so I rebooted the machine to attempt this. With the Mac Mini connected to the ViewSonic using the VGA cable, the installer launched without any issue and I proceeded to install the OS.

Everything was going well, until I reached the partitioning stage. As there was already a Apple BootStrap defined from the previous Debian install, I simply deleted the Linux partitions and created an LVM based install, with a partition for /boot, one for the root file system, one dedicated to swap, with another dedicated to be used as an LVM physical volume. After defining this partition scheme and all my logical volumes, I tried to continue to the next step in the installer, however, I was presented with the message: "You have not defined a boot partition".

After some reading through the Fedora PPC howto guide, I decided to recreate the Apple BootStrap partition. so I simply removed all the partitions and started from scratch. I created a 1MB Apple BootStrap partition (as suggested by the howto) and the rest of the partitions/volumes as before.

This time, when I hit "Next", the installer began to create all the relevant partitions and logical volumes. But I was again presented with an error; this time the installer had failed to create the volume group. This meant I had to exit the installation and reboot the machine.

After the reboot, I booted into the installer again, and hit CTRL+ALT+F2 to bring up another virtual console; this one is a basic shell you can use to assist in troubleshooting installations. Running the LVM command I inspected the configuration of the system. I immediately found that the installer had not actually run the appropriate commands to turn the specific partition into an LVM physical volume. I ran this command manually (pvcreate /dev/hda4) and then created the volume group too.

I then switched back to the installer console (ATL+F6) in an attempt to use the partitioning tool to assign the already existing partitions (/boot, root and swap) to their relevant roles and create the logical volumes I wanted to have. Unfortunately, the partitioning tool didn't appear to see the Apple BootStrap partition(s) that had been created previously and, as I suspected, I was unable to progress through the install as I was presented with the "You have not defined a boot partition" message again!

I could not see a way to get the system working with logical volumes and, by this time, I just wanted to get a working Fedora install, so I resort to merely creating basic partitions for the file systems I wanted. There is no room in the Mac Mini to install additional HDDs, so I wouldn't have the opportunity to extend my file systems in the future anyway!

After settling for this more basic configuration, the installation progressed without any further problems and I eventually managed to boot into a working install of Fedora 11.

Here's a pic of the machine in-situ; note the monitor in the picture is not the ViewSonic monitor that I described having trouble with in the article:


Summary

In summary, the issues I had with installing Fedora 11 on an Apple Mac Mini were:

  • I experienced issues with ViewSonic VG2030wm monitor; the installer wouldn't display when using a DVI cable to connect to the screen. I needed to use a VGA cable in conjunction with a DVI-to-VGA adaptor.

  • Issues creating logical volumes. It appeared that the installer had not executed the pvcreate command before attempting to create the volume group. I ended up resorting to a system based on standard partitions.


I hope this post can help others attempting to install Fedora (or any other distro) on the G4 Mac Mini. If nothing else, at least I can come back to it, should I need to install Linux on an old Mac Mini again.