Fienix, the Modern PowerPC Linux Distro

[@jeffbillings]

One man’s e-waste is another man’s e-treasure

[@cutemartinj]

or just e-waste

[@j.m.7580]

Installed this on a dual-core PowerMac G5. Smoothest Linux install on PPC in my experience. Fast and responsive - thanks for featuring this district.

[@bufanda]

Regarding package issues, you had 30 not upgraded packages in one screen. Maybe a apt full-upgrade could have helped. Probably the package you wanted to install just needed the new versions of libraries that weren't updated yet.. Just a wild guess

[@CFWhitman]

I was thinking the same thing. Fienix seemed to be rolling, so if that's true, that is what you should be doing anyway.

[@SockyNoob]

​@@CFWhitman strange to have a rolling release based on Debian lol

[@CFWhitman]

@@SockyNoob In a way, it is. But remember that Debian sid is rolling, and there have been Sidux and Siduction as separate rolling distributions based on it in the past.

[@codyisrude]

The issue with your gpu is that you might be using the legacy branch of the radeon driver you could try making a conf file in the X11 folder to tell the kernel load the amdgpu driver instead but that would depend on if that gpu is compatible with the amdgpu driver which it might not be since it's an older amd graphics card the archwiki has all the info about this and most of what is listed on that wiki works on other distros as well

[@olnnn]

That gpu is way to old for amdgpu, it uses the radeon driver, amdgpu only supports GCN 1.0 and newer gpus (e.g many radeon HD 7000 series) which are like 8 years newer. It is barely new enough to be still supported by up to date mesa though and it's worth installing a very up to date version of mesa if possible as there is actually passionate guy working on improving r300 driver for these very old radeon cards. (THe pre-dx9 ati cards are not and only supported by the buggy mesa-amber legacy branch so don't work nearly as well on modern linux for anything graphics acceleration)

[@johncate9541]

@@olnnn Correct. Even my Radeon HD 6970 can only use the radeon driver, and it's five years newer than what is in that G5. But getting the latest Mesa going might fix whatever is wrong here.

[@taxevader86]

FEIN LINUX ? THATS WHAT AM TALKING ABOUT 🔥

[@couldnt.really.say.]

Fein fein fein

[@Xlib_2000]

@@couldnt.really.say. fin fin fin fin fin fin

[@clazypants]

@Xlib_2000 feiiinn feiin feeiin yeah

[@alexgamingyt-cj1bf]

travis scott linux

[@kirekocev2587]

Real

[@bradmccartney187]

We Powermac users need new options in keeping old hardware up and running. Glad to see at least one more great option still out there. Thanks Sean for sharing this with us. Keep the great video's coming.

[@ArchLars]

Hell yeah

[@alanharkleroad4376]

Eventually, it is the famous last word of people everywhere. But Fienix is what I'm going to to to my G5 Imac, eventually.

[@NathanSmith-lv7xf]

I am currently looking at my mac thinking "will install flenix later"

[@hardlyworgen71]

"... our sponsor DELETE ME ... "(youtube ad cuts in at this point before the actual Delete Me segment.)

[@thecorruptedbit5585]

P.A. Semi's PWRficient G5 might've kept the G5 going in mobile form for a little longer, but it was too little too late in 2007

[@Gamerbay2017]

You should do a series of trying to run Minecraft on as many Macs as possible - see how many can!

[@mllarson]

Yeah a Mac LAN party would be fun to watch!

[@mryoshii]

I think classicube will be a lot better and easier , just imagine run classicube on as many pcs / mac's as possible

[@couldnt.really.say.]

More like see what can't

[@4ngeldus739]

That's literally just this channel though, he's tested Minecraft on pretty much anything that will run it

[@couldnt.really.say.]

@@4ngeldus739 wish he did a little more then mac's tho, like to see how he can modernize an old 95 rig or something

[@gilbertogarma2820]

I think that originally is a Raspberry Pi OS based in Ubuntu, thanks a lot for the effort to bring something new that old is, that is so and stay so

[@propjoe1060]

Love this channel. I have an old iMac G4 at home somewhere. Must give this distro a shot!

[@curiouspharmacy4775]

I had this PPC iMac. Used it on mac os for a long while then switched to Ubuntu Mate till version 16 when they dropped support. I think i was using this till 2018 and then donated it. the b43 fw cutter wifi issue has plagued all macs with broadcom chips even intel ones. but lots of guides online on how to fix it. This thing was a beast. I remember we turned off the screen and used it as a NAS at one point. Great memories.

[@jarms40]

First: Casey rocks. This is a great service to the PPC community. Secondly, it would be great if Fienix offered some NVIDIA proprietary drivers (or if the development environment worked so that drivers could be installed manually). Nouveau doesn't quite do it for most Mac compatible cards.

[@andrewrandrianasulu_]

Eh? This is powerpc, big endian machine. I do not think Nvidia's proprietary driver was ever ported to that (macos x driver also probably quite different from linux one ...) one problem with nouveau was different non-4k page size set for most Linux kernels back when ppc was supported architecture. There of course might be another set of gremlins because according to at least one Nouveau developer Ilia Mirkin (who implemented a lot of video decoding /reverse engineering on x86 for nv30/40 gpus - geforce 5200/6xxx series ) - those gpus had only partial support for big endian operations .. so much fun for driver writer .. too much for one, evidently

[@jarms40]

@@andrewrandrianasulu_ One should be able to compile the Linux driver for the PPC, no?

[@andrewrandrianasulu_]

Linux driver still mostly binary object, and I am fairly sure does have few simplifications when it comes to commonicating with gpu. On LE machines you send 4321 to card On BE machines you send 1234 easy to deal if you only ever talk to one register, but there are many, many of them, not counting PCI apertures for accesing VRAM directly from cpu side ... Older Nvidia had some hardware byteswapping built-in, but you must configure it separately. Unfortunately, even simple TNT GPU from year 1999 was too complex to fully undeestand/emulate. Full drivers for PS3 (Also powerpc + nv40 alike GPU) never materialized, even if RPCS3 emulator now run games ... gpu driver development is hard, esp. if your error just hang everything hard way.

[@andrewrandrianasulu_]

powerpcliberation.blogspot.com/2015/07/g5-nouveau-2d-acceleration.html?m=1 on nouveau/G5 situation back in 2015 ....g4 might not suffer from this,soecifically? But as evidenced by Hackintosh community late Apple had interesting habit of hardcoding gpu output table into their AMD driver, so many non-apple gpu cards ended up sending their output to /dev/null ... may be some blackscreen issues actually of this nature?

[@NerdFrequency]

The architecture isnt quite dead yet. I have to work on PowerPC based SBCs at work and this project looks like it might be useful in development.

[@JohnPorter4096]

Hmm I'm liking the new series - hopefully that 4 GB stick arrrives soon!!

[@LonksAwakening]

I got that exact model for free from a trash pile on the side of the road. Almost none of the distros I’ve tried, other than one specific Ubuntu release have worked, so I guess now I know what I should put on it

[@jonc4403]

Hmm. Maybe I'll give that Linux distro a shot on one of my G5 towers. After all, winter is coming up, a little extra heat in the office won't hurt much.

[@Rajorsi]

6:13 Perfect time for a segue featuring a sponsor protecting you from getting on to phishing websites by mistyping the link. 😎

[@ChrisJackson-js8rd]

T2 still supports powerpc and pretty much everything the kernel drops

[@GuyJames]

I have the exact same G5 iMac (had no idea it was rare, either) and so obviously I'm going to give Fienix a try, thanks

[@richardbrobeck2384]

Me either I have the same machine too.

[@Sparky400]

The real rate one is the version of this with the CF card reader.

[@GuyJames]

@@Sparky400 mine has that too 👍

[@andrewr1355]

Thanks for the video! I have a G4 iMac I need to replace the HDD in and I couldn’t decide if I wanted to go with old Mac OS or try PPC Linux. This distro looks great for making an old desktop marginally useful 20 years later.

[@atemoc]

2:13 Another distribution that supports PowerPC and an obscene amount of other CPU architectures and hardware is T2 SDE Linux. Quite unknown even though it has been here for decades, and it is still actively maintained.

[@davidgoodnow269]

Wow, thanks for the tip! Setting up the download now!

[@retronoobtech8551]

I know you won't answer as usual, but I'm glad you gave space to this beautiful distro. I have used it for almost a year on my G5 dual 4gb ram, and I must say that as an experience it is certainly more refined than debian vanilla. That said, there are many issues that have prevented me from fully enjoying it as an office workstation. First of all, DE cinnamon is very slow, and honestly this affects the experience. Then, I was absolutely unable to get the digital signature I need to work (Arubakey) to work. It's just a shame.

[@singletona082]

Your channel is why I'm considering getting an older Power PC Mac.... Damned you sean! I don't have the money for this!

[@ActionRetro]

hah!

[@notuptome]

Start a gofund me . 😂

[@pretty_bored]

Power Mac G5s go for about 30-50 bucks here where I live

[@davidgoodnow269]

​@@pretty_bored Sheesh . . . I haven't seen one around here in ten years to try to buy!

[@joshuat502]

this was so cool to watch especially as i am watching this on a 2005 thinkpad g41 with a desktop cpu and 768mb of ram.

[@TwelveBaud]

The problem with installing Java was that it was also going to install the latest trusted root certificates, but that package says it needs the Ubuntu-tweaked Java and you were installing regular Java. Which is super weird. Based on what I saw on your screen, the problem with installing build-essential is that the GNU compiler suite doesn't have a default PPC build anymore; you may need to use a different name to install it and then convince dpkg that that really is GCC, GPP, etc.

[@MaksBrochu]

You said "torturing it with linux" but I think you meant that you "have graced it with Linux"

[@aytviewer2421]

Really love those extremely deep bass "thuds" in the outro. They sound awesome on my speakers. oh yea!

[@aytviewer2421]

Crazy it's already been decades! Crazy!

[@alexandrecouture2462]

I had a similar experience with Debian 12 PPC on my G4 PowerBook. So many packages missing...

[@terinjokes]

How now, that's a screenshot of Gentoo on x86-64!

[@nadirafurry]

here is some weird distros based on debian I've tried recently: Antix, MX linux, and q4os. I really do like the trinity desktop.

[@markshade8398]

Nice job, as always!

[@kirekocev2587]

Fein fein fein fein fein fein 🔥🔥

[@janetno1fan]

I want more Haiku videos :)

[@MacManPro36]

I second this!!

[@CACressida]

I have a g5 imac in my garage i use to keep inventory of all my crap. It couldnt play youtube videos a decade ago either.

[@kyanche]

I find modern linux to be fantastic with printers and scanners! It even handles scanning from my ancient canon mx860 with no need to install anything.

[@waydegutman7339]

Fienix is impressive, make kind of wished I had my old G5 iMac still around.

[@aytviewer2421]

Why does it seem that software back then was both easier and more "funner" to use?

[@corylyon545]

Because software as a service hadn't taken over yet. Consumers actually expected to have real productivity suites.

[@aytviewer2421]

@@corylyon545 I still think most desktop software is better performing and feature-laden than SAAS. Not only that, but the old buy once and use till you feel like upgrading or migrating was fantastic too.

[@Fatblokeonamoped]

I installed this after last time's video Sean on my MDD Twin 1.42Ghz on a fresh SSD and stock GPU but after install I just got a black screen during the boot. I followed the instructions on the Blogspot web page for ATI GPU but didn't sort the issue. Seeing how you've had some GPU issues too, I don't feel so bad now however at least you got to the GUI interface. I won't give up on it because it's great to see a Linux distro for PowerPC and it looks pretty darned cool.

[@classicube]

Sweet video, as usual 😎

[@dkctc]

I have an iMac G5 A1058 17in version. I've been using it as a doorstop in my bathroom to prevent the door from blowing shut when the windows are open. Maybe I'll find a replacement doorstop for an afternoon lol.

[@ghostraider4312]

Impressive what the Linux community brings to the table. 20 year old hardware still having life.

[@BorisaComputers]

Thinking about putting this on my 20" iMac G4 lampshade

[@Maxxwell-07]

Another fun project would be to fit a mini pc in that case and essentially make your own all in one

[@BRBTechTalk]

13:37 I love messing around with that kind of hardware. I used to have one of those but with the Core2 Duo not the Power PC processor.

[@igmartymartinez7881]

Hey! im a a fan of old imac and i get nostalgic about them, i would like to revive them as they are falling into obsolescence but i dont know how to burn linux onto a cd or dvd could you make a video tutorial on it?

[@benotsilent6703]

I bought an imac a1058 for $50 last week. It powers on but stays at the mac os 10 boot screen forever. Now I get to take it apart and spruce it up like you did this one. It's the 17" version, not 20" unfortunately but still something fun to play with.

[@Lilithe]

8:00 Textures weren't missing so much as... all facing away from you for some reason? Yeah it looks like all the normals in the game are flipped. Some weird thing in the build?

[@VincentOuellet-fy3sy]

At first glance it looks like backface culling applied to front facing polygons, but this would likely result in no graphics being displayed at all. Moreover, it seems to mostly affect nearby polygons. At 8:04, almost no polygons are missing. I'm wondering if a driver bug is causing this; the drivers for this GPU haven't seen much maintenance recently, at least as far as I know, even less so on ppc/ppc64.

[@VincentOuellet-fy3sy]

And the glitchy graphics on SuperTuxKart kind of confirm the driver issues. But hey, I'm not complaining about the impromptu unlicensed Boundary Break episode!

[@dmwzr]

>Literally nothing works, but it prints Totally usable! 😀🖐

[@sdgx0]

mac86: all i see you do is install linux and make computers cry

[@patrickfinie4102]

Tumbleweed wont work as support has long since been dropped from PowerPC Big Endian. PowerPC G5 support was dropped in 12.1. All work on the Power build is targeting the Power 8 and 9 architectures which are Little Endian. All the apple PowerPC processors are based on Power 3-4. I hope this helps.

[@richardbrobeck2384]

I will keep my eye on this project because I also have this same computer that I would like to use to stream music !

[@thecrow3461]

This linux distro makes this computer actually very usable, i'm surprised!

[@therobb5738]

I have one of these macs, but not another mac to do target-disk mode on. So Linux looks pretty good for an install. I also have the core duo mini mac, but it's in pieces and I probably won't be putting it back together. Sure do miss it though!

[@stevielynn7130]

I'm always down for exploring Linux distros! I am crazy enough to daily drive Ubuntu Studio, after all...

[@abdelali9279]

Fein, Fein, Fein

[@jekylltraveler]

Would be interesting to see if you can build Yocto images for these older PCs.

[@pud469]

I never had any luck with Fienix linux on any G4. Could never get it to install, but also never tired on a G5. I really think that one step in supporting these old machines is to get yaboot back. I definitely installed Debian Sid on my G4, and used EXT3 so I can run yaboot vs grub. It was a bit of work, but much better experience to not have to go to the boot picker to get to MacOs for troubleshooting. yaboot was simple, grub is clunky, unpolished, and hates MacOS. There is some code out there for yaboot and ext4, but I have no idea how to integrate it, and even if I did, I do not believe 100% of the source is available. I guess maybe the future should be getting grub to better support PPC MacOs. What i really do not get is the 7 small partitions it creates.

[@ArchLars]

YT vids to VLC or MPV is a perfect way to watch vids on old hardware on Linux. DLing YT vids may be against the TOS of KZbin but I think it should be given a pass if you are poor with a computer like this and it's your only option.

[@jacobmckenna8661]

It's kind of crazy that all intel macs are capable of running Windows 10

[@metallurgico]

A Blogspot site? It sounds so retro

[@Francois_L_7933]

I wonder if this thing could run MorphOS? Now that would be really interesting... 😉

[@SockyNoob]

Minetest is a much better stress test than ClassiCube, not to mention fully featured and not just a mere tech demo.

[@TradieTrev]

T2 SDE Linux also supports PowerPC btw ;)

[@John7No]

just for clarity, G5 was the most powerful even when Apple changed to Intel. Even after 2 years that Apple was providing Xeaon. BUT it was Desktop processor and Not laptop oriented. THis is why Apple with the change to Intel started using the per watt performance

[@userperson5259]

Is there a proprietary video driver available maybe? Probably not for PPC but maybe since it would have had that originally? I've got two dual-cpu G4 Powermacs here.. I'm gunna try Fienix.

[@dxniner]

8:52 you should be able to use yt-dlp and any media player (i think? personally i use mpv) to play youtube videos as a stream without needing to download the video first. not sure how a powerpc will handle it, but it should be the most lightweight way to watch youtube if formats aren't an issue.

[@Txm_Dxr_Bxss]

I installed Fienix a year ago on my iMac G5. I think there was no arcticfox around then.

[@Taiko_Drum]

Just curious, how's the cursed Macintosh, did you get it fixed? Also nice video

[@Jester2All]

"taking e-waste and torturing it with Linux" 😂 ☠️ I subscribed just because of that 😂

[@tracyterpstra]

Will Fienix Linux run on a modern Raptor computing power 9 processor reliably? Could you do a video testing / demonstrating that?

[@gluttonousmaximus9048]

I wonder if similar efforts have been made for the earlier 90s Macs

[@Charaqat]

I would assume that the Linux distros that still support PPC will also support the newer-ish Amigas from Acube or A-EON so thats useful too as AmigaOS is ?discontinued

[@will_it_work]

Intel also started innovating around the time too. The P3/P4 era was terrible. So the timing was right.

[@serje78]

Hrm, Debian based Linux on G5. Just curious - does it support VA-API libs? Not necessarily on this iMac, may be on MacPro G5. Theoretically is there are proper GPU drivers with h264 video decode acceleration? Firefox can be forced to use vaapi for video decode In some... bizarre rig one may can even try Broadcom Crystall HD video decoder (if libs available today).

[@devwithzachary]

Oh great another distro I need to try put on my G5 iMac 😅😂

[@GSi999]

Try with Java 17, it is LTS. 18 is not. Or even 23, it launched on September this year

[@boydpukalo8980]

I am pretty sure linux AMD GPU drivers/Mesa have long standing PPC-BE bugs causing the graphical glitches you experienced in 3D?

[@mattsword41]

ah crap, there goes another weekend. going to have to try this 😂

[@ZanyCat]

The 3D graphics are very fast at being wrong!

[@DavideNastri]

What is the magic tool he is using to download KZbin easily? Neat! Love this Linux, does it perform decent on g3 / g4?

[@CharlieBravoDXB]

How is this rate. I have 8 27" g5 in my attic. Also this is peak macos with this beautiful wallpaper

[@daedalao756]

I just got done trying to run Fienix on my A1095 PowerBook G4. But my lower ram slot is dead. Blank screen for four hours. I'd like the option to drop to a terminal instead of trying to load straight into light_dm

[@charlesjmouse]

Thank you. I wonder if MorphOS could be persuaded to run on this machine?

[@faenethlorhalien]

Yeah, I had a music teacher who got his G5 (a Mac Pro, but whatever) literally 1 month before Apple went Intel. Oh boy...

[@yorkan213swd6]

You did not install those brocken fils when booted first time (firmware?)

[@Ghozer]

I thought Fienix was eol, and support/updates had stopped - at least that's how it was at the start of the year, has the situation changed now? :D

[@dimka4996]

I had similar issues with this GPU back then, but on windows xp and Pentium 4. I don't know exactly what it is, maybe vram

[@JayceeRaven]

Thought I would give Fienix one last go after it not working well on my G4 Mac Mini now after seeing Seans video I figured it would work seeing as I have the same iMac G5 however I keep running into yaboot installation failure wondering if Sean had this issue and if he knows of a fix the only thing I could find online was to install grub but that fails as well!!

[@meumau-x8v]

Can you make an Apple TV with A5 into a small computer? Is there a Linux that can run on it?

nice

[@DrewBlue32]

Do you know if this will work on PPC laptops like the iBooks and Powerbooks? There are a lot of those where I live.

[@xeschire706]

Does it support graphics acceleration though? 🧐

[@Smok_win98]

When are you going to do the emac video that you was fixing

[@speedsrj]

I have a couple of Powerbooks here, does it work on G4?

[@ericwood3709]

This is why my PPC Macs just run various versions of Mac OS. It's what they are best at / for, and I'm just glad to have old Macs that work at all. Good way to do some classic gaming and geekery.

[@replikvltyoutube3727]

It would be cool if you could try out T2/sde linux

[@markshade8398]

What is the name/link for the KZbin downloader????