DEV Community: Amber 🏳️‍🌈

Adventures in PowerPC Linux Pt 2: Bootloader Nonsense

Amber 🏳️‍🌈 — Thu, 17 Dec 2020 20:50:19 +0000

Hello!

This is the second post in my series about installing Gentoo Linux on a Mac Mini G4.

I started by following the PowerPC Handbook on Gentoo's wiki, which is pretty good.

It has a few problems, however. It tells you to use yaboot as your bootloader, instead of GRUB. This is strange because the livecd image they provide uses GRUB.

The (main) problem with yaboot is that it simply does not vibe with ext4. It will not boot. Instead, it gives a cryptic error and exits.

Of course, I did not know this while installing, and fell right into this trap. I was very worried that I would have to start all the way over (I had spent a few hours at this point), because I did not have a separate /boot partition. If I stayed with yaboot, I would have had to re-format my disk as something other than ext4 and start over.

This error will probably not be fixed, as yaboot is no longer maintained.

Thankfully, someone on a forum about this bug suggested using GRUB, and I'm glad they did. It works very well, and is also what I'm used to.

So, moral of the story, use GRUB, and the wiki should probably be changed, or at least edited.

Next post I'll describe kernel config and driver issues, and give a copy of my kernel config for anyone who tries this.

Adventures in PowerPC Linux Pt 1: A Choice

Amber 🏳️‍🌈 — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 15:43:59 +0000

Hello!
I recently stumbled upon an old Mac Mini G4. It had 10.4 Tiger on it, and it was pretty slow. So, I decided to try and install Linux on it. First, I needed to decide what distro to install.

There are three choices when it comes to PowerPC Linux: Debian, Adelie, and Gentoo.

Debian is pretty much a non-option, because it's an older version (9 Jessie) and all of the PowerPC repos for it have been removed. I'd have to compile everything from scratch, which defeats the point of Debian.

Adelie is an interesting binary distro. It has a focus on using musl (instead of glibc) and python3. It provides binary packages for PowerPC. This is probably the easiest option.

And then there's Gentoo. Gentoo is a source distro, which means that binary packages are not provided. Everything must be compiled from source. This gives Gentoo a lot of flexibility and optimization potential, but makes it very complex to install. This is the one I chose.

Next post I'll be describing the initial install process, and (spoilers) all of the problems that came with it.

My first (real) open source contribution

Amber 🏳️‍🌈 — Fri, 18 Sep 2020 14:25:32 +0000

This week, I added a contribution to the documentation for Gwion, and I'm gonna share the process here.

The reason I say this was my first real contribution is because I technically have done this before, but it was just copy-pasting someone else's fix, from a fork that had diverged too much from master.

So, on to the story:

I was scrolling through dev.to (hey, thats where this article is!) and found one of those "request for contributors" posts. There was a link to a music-making programming language called Gwion. It looked interesting, so I added my name to a (small) list of people, and waited.

I got invited to a Github organization, and joined. When I got there, I found it populated with a few people who were talking about syntax and other code things.

I had signed on to help with documentation, so I took a look... Yeah, they weren't kidding when they said it was WIP.

I made a post on the organization with my suggestions of what I could do, and received very positive feedback!

So, I started work. I fixed up the main page of the docs. I had to ask a few questions, but I got it done. (The pronouns thing in the cover image was me adding the pronouns of the maintainer) I submitted a PR, and it got approved!

I've done a few more since then, and it's really fun. I'm glad I started doing this. I recommend it!

This Week in Rust is really cool

Amber 🏳️‍🌈 — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 21:01:59 +0000

I just wanted to write a quick post about This Week in Rust, just in case anyone actually reads these. It's a really cool newsletter that combines a bunch of info and sends it to your inbox. I promise I'm not sponsored or anything.

It combines links to:

Offical rust blog posts
Tooling updates
This Month in Rust Gamedev
This Month in Rust OSDev
New rust tutorials
New rust briefs
Project updates

..and basically anything else. I highly recommend it.

Solving Rustc 'cannot find -lxcb-shape'

Amber 🏳️‍🌈 — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 19:40:26 +0000

I wanted to learn Amethyst, a pretty cool game engine made in Rust. But when I tried to compile the "Hello World" project, I got the error cannot find -lxcb-shape. This led to a few wasted hours and a lot of headaches, so I thought I'd share the fix here.

I first tried to just run apt get install libxcb-shape. It didn't exist. I thought this meant that the package wasn't in the Debian package list, but I was wrong.

Then I tried just googling my exact issue, but I gave up quick. I should have kept going, because my answer was there, but whatever.

I then moved to figuring out what lxcb was, and apparently it's some sort of X window system.. thing. I'm still not really sure what it does.

I found their GitLab page, and decided to try and compile and install it myself. There were a couple of dependencies I had to compile and install first, but eventually I got it installed.

It didn't work. All of those hours were a waste.

I went back to googling my exact issue, as I mentioned earlier, and found something. There was a stackoverflow thread that mentioned the exact same problem.

I should have read the entire stackoverflow thread, but I just went comment by comment until I found this, a package listing for Ubuntu. It had the incredibly memorable and useful name of libxcb-shape0-dev. Why there is a 0 there, I have no idea. There is probably a good reason, but I don't know it, so it annoyed me.

I installed that specific library, and it worked! My amethyst example was compiling! But there's something else.

I was gonna end it here, but then, writing this article, I went and checked that stackoverflow thread again, and one person had linked the README for the amethyst project. There was a list of dependencies that I hadn't installed. This whole thing was just me being an idiot and not reading. I have never channeled Druaga1 more than in this moment.

So, moral of the story, check the dependencies of things you install before going down a rabbit hole of self-compiling random libraries you now have no way of easily removing, so they'll just stay there.

Thank you for reading about this mess.