Since the storm and the later apartment move, I’ve been slowly paring down and simplifying my home network.
So long, rack. Hope you find a good home, HP ProCurve 400m, Cobalt boxes, and various multi-U rack cases.
Over the past few days, I have taken another step. For a long time now, I’ve been running an AMD Athlon 750 MHz (Slot A!) based system as my main home server. Still running strong and stable, if noisy.
Well, that box got turned off the other day. It has been replaced by a much smaller, quieter, G4 Mac Mini. It had been sitting in a box for a while, and I decided it was time to Linux-ify it.
It was a pretty easy install and is much quieter and faster, and I’m going to go ahead and post up a caveat or two and a config or two for you other G4 Mac Mini Linux (Gentoo specific) peoples.
#uname -a
Linux halo 2.6.18.4 #5 Sun Jan 7 14:51:37 CST 2007 ppc 7447A, altivec supported PowerMac10,1 GNU/Linux
1) Kernel configs: Mine doesn’t have wi-fi or bluetooth, so I turned it all off. Your integrated ethernet device uses the Sun GEM driver. Also, weird thing here, you _must_ enable framebuffer support and compile in your proper video card. Lame, but necessary. A simple lspci yielded the following relevant info:
0000:00:10.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV280 [Radeon 9200] (rev 01)
2) /etc/make.conf (your use flags will vary, but you should add altivec anyways:
CFLAGS=”-O3 -pipe -mcpu=7400 -mtune=G4 -maltivec -mabi=altivec -fno-strict-aliasing -mpowerpc-gfxopt -fomit-frame-pointer”
CHOST=”powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu”
CXXFLAGS=”${CFLAGS}”
MAKEOPTS=”-j2″
PORTAGE_NICENESS=3
AUTOCLEAN=”yes”
FEATURES=”ccache”
CCACHE_DIR=”/var/tmp/ccache/”
CCACHE_SIZE=”2G”USE=”altivec apache2 ssl php session unicode mailwrapper mysql mysqli nfs zlib -ldap -doc -java -X -X11 -opengl -cups -ipv6 -gdk -gtk -gnome -qt -qt3 -qt4 -kde -alsa”
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=”~ppc”
3) Well, that’s really all. It wasn’t a very bad install, outside of figuring out that framebuffer issue and the inherent dumbness of yaboot.