Fedora 5 {test,development} on G5?

[David Timms]

Peter Seebach wrote:

>Hi!  I have been told that I must make a very fast PPC system run Linux, as
>soon as possible.
>  
>
Hmm, "no time" is probably not a good development candidate! but we like 
to test...

>The obvious candidate would be Fedora 5 test releases, since the quad G5
>doesn't work with much older stuff.
>
>With FC5 test2, I had no joy even booting all the way.
>
>With FC5 "development", I got a bootable CD (yay!), then spent a day
>downloading RPMs.  At the end of this, I tried to run the install.  I
>  
>
Maybe you could try an ftp install. At the boot prompt: linux text 
askmethod. Choose ftp, put in
download.fedora.redhat.com
pub/fedora/linux/core/development/ppc64
Then when getting to package selection, choose as little as possible (eg 
no office productivity etc), to reduce the downloads that need to be 
done. (make sure you get yum installed, or it all becomes too hard !).

>pointed the installer at the Fedora/ppc64 (I am a ppc64, yes?) directory
>on the machine I did the downloads on, and it said it was fetching
>"Fedora/base/stage2.img".  Then it announced that these files did not match
>my boot media.
>  
>
Lots of stuff gets rebuilt everyday, this could easily cause this 
problem if uR download takes a long time, ie files _do_ change. In my 
time zone, the rebuilds are around 7:30a (check what it is in your TZ).

>I noticed, around this time, that many of the files in the directory
>I'd been downloading from were now dated Jan 31, which they hadn't been
>when I started, so I assumed I just needed new boot media.  Here, we run into
>madness.  There isn't anything in the likely directory:
>
>download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/development/ppc64/images
>
>In .../ppc/images, there's a boot.iso, so I grabbed that, filled in the
>stage2.img and a few related files, just to see whether I could run anything
>at all.  That boot image boots (yay!), and lets me fetch stage2.img (yay!).
>Then it asserts that there was an error retrieving the installation file.
>Poking in webserver logs reveals it is trying to find "product.img".
>
>Only, I haven't seen anything named that EVER.  So I can't imagine what it's
>looking for, or what failure mode caused it to start looking for this file.
>  
>
These are optional parts that probably hang about from redhat releases. 
I also see the same attempts with my systems (on i386), so I believe 
this is normal. You can look at Alt-F3, Alt-F4 to see what the installer 
is actually trying to do. It then gets around to the real 
one...[options.img, updates.img, stage2.img]

>At this point, I'm a fair bit stumped.  I am not deeply wedded to running
>development releases.  That said, I'd be happy to run one, if I can figure
>out what useful clue I'm missing for the install.  It seems very much as
>though the "development" tree is being updated live on the server, because
>there's new dates and some files not yet present.  But the test trees don't
>seem to work.
>  
>
There is times in the development tree where:
1. The build system is building packages, where files might be getting 
updated as you are in the proces of downloading / installing.
2. A particular selection of packages has unresolvable dependencies due 
to the above, or because particular packages have been updated but the 
dependent packages need to be rebuilt to match.
Usually it's only a short time until it "green to go".

>So...
>
>1.  Am I even barking up the right tree?  Do quad G5's run Linux?  Do they
>run Fedora in particular?  Are test/development releases the way to go?
>  
>
No idea! (intels / amds only in this household)

>2.  Assuming it might be productive for me to install a test release, is
>there some obvious pilot error in trying to boot from the boot.iso image
>and load the files from .../development/ppc64?
>  
>
See the above, it might help.
DaveT.