This Is Apfelhammer!

As I wrote yesterday, the new ArchPOWER Linux for PowerPC 64 works like charme and with big thanks to (Kernel/Linux)-Hacker René Rebe, Firefox is working on POWER-Architecture (and much more) again after years. So you can use a modern Browser if you want.

But in the last post, I only described how you get your base system up and running while booting from usb pen drive. But you want more :-) A GUI I bet. So if you have a running instance, or when you are still in the live environment of the booted usb pen drive, you can chroot into the freshly installed ARCH Linux and can perfom different tasks. E.g. install a GUI. While the Powermac is not the fastest machine in 2025 anymore and a lot of packages are not available for ppc64, XFCe is a good idea for a good looking and modern desktop environment. My mac has the stock nVidia Geforce 6600GS graphicsboard so we need the driver for this to have 2d-acceleration. This is important, otherwise the gui is not useful because it is too slow.

Read more...