installing gento on ibook G4 - tips and choices?

Supaiku · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Oct 2004 Posts: 128

Hey there,

I'm about to embark on a lil gentoo install on an iBook G4 - I haven't installed gentoo since highschool - some years!

Anyhow, this is my first tim eworking with power pc stuff and I'm wrapping my head around all this endian stuff and ppc64 vs ppc.

It seems my Powerbook 6,7 is a PowerPC 7447a (G4) which should be ppc (not ppc64).

So - pehraps I'm gonna use big-endian ppcc because I don't even see any little endian archives: https://www.gentoo.org/downloads/#ppc

Should I consider a musl installation? or does that not matter?

Any other tips?

Haven't made my install media, which will hopefully be a USB drive since I think the CD ROM drive is broken.

Thanks!

Supaiku · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Oct 2004 Posts: 128

It looks like the ppc live image doesn't have yaboot - so having trouble booting from USB - anyone got that part going?

exuberantmonkey · n00b Joined: 09 Apr 2023 Posts: 19

All Apple PPC are big endian, and G4 is definitely 32-bit.

I've only installed gentoo on PowerMac G5, and even on that platform, I could not get the installation image to boot from a USB stick. There are comments on the web about booting into open firmware, finding your USB device and entering a command to boot from it, but I could not get it working. I burned the image to a CD and booted from that.

Supaiku · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 22 Oct 2004 Posts: 128

In Open Firmware the command