Ubuntu

Ubuntu Edgy or Feisty on the MacPro

Asked by Michael Flaig

This is not a precise question, i know. But I hope someone else with an MacPro got it to fly and can give me some hints.
As you can see in my other support request i haven't had any luck with feisty installer, because raid setup is broken in herd1

Machine is as follows:
MacPro
2 GB Ram
2x 250 GB Disks
Sony DVD
ATI X1900

Using amd64 Version of Ubuntu

So I took the long way and with a lot of patience and an external usb dvd drive I got edgy installed. Edgy didn't recognize the X1900 which should be supported by the latest ati drivers... So I upgraded to Feisty. But as u know feisty isn't stable yet and problems are to be expected. Well there are. Currently the fglrx isn't installable. Due to libgcc version problems. So I will wait for this to get fixed.

Does anyone already have feisty running on the MacPro, Maybe also with the X1900?
Does anyone know if the mactel-linux patches are already in 2.6.19 ubuntu?

And has anyone else had the problem that after the upgrade the initrd seems to be broken?
I cannot boot the 2.6.19 kernel. If I try I find myself in initramfs shell which claims not to find the root file system.

Hoping for a little conversation here ...

Thanks in Advance.

Michael

PS : Some notes on my efforts to get ubuntu or debian to fly can be found at https://secure.netzblock.org/helpdesk/macpro/wiki/MacproDocumentationNotes

As soon as the setup is compatible with end users I plan to release an installation guide in englisch and german, so others would have a more easy way to free their mac :-)

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Michael Flaig
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Revision history for this message
Jonathan Jesse (jjesse) said : 		#1

Have you filed any bugs on the problems that you are having w/ your macbook? It would help the developers out greatly.
Also is there a laptop-testing team page on the wiki that talks about the macbook? If not it would be very helpful to create one

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Michael Flaig (mflaig) said : 		#2

First this is about the MacPro (desktop) not the MacbookPro (notebook)...
... you sould have cklicked on the MacPro link at my Trac Wiki :-)

And yes I have filed a bug against partman-md (feisty installer), yesterday.

Revision history for this message
Alan Pope 🍺🐧🐱 🦄 (popey) said : 		#3

Holy cow that's humungous

(jealous).

I have nothing further to add than the standard "feisty is in development - it will likely break before it works well", sorry, I don't have any exposure to MacPros, although if you want to buy me one, I will promise to be a very good friend to you.

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Michael Flaig (mflaig) said : 		#4

I think it's good that feisty is still in development. So there is still a chance to find and solve the major problems before feisty gets final. I will spend most of my spare time to identify problems, finding solutions or workarounds and submitting bug reports. Also I will document what I find in the wiki.

The next steps will be to create a linux-image package that simply works on the macpro (probably with some patches from mactel-linux.org) and to configure Xorg with ati fglrx driver.

Hopefullly the final feisty can be installed on a macpro without too much of manual tweaking then...

Alan: I've heard that apple has so many of those MacPros that they even need to sell them ;-)

Revision history for this message
Alan Pope 🍺🐧🐱 🦄 (popey) said : 		#5

I guess then that you might want to close this support ticket, and at your discretion track the feisty development. You can test using the "herd" CDs. which will come out periodically over the next few months.

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Best Michael Flaig (mflaig) said : 		#6

Seems that nobody reading here has a macpro or wants to share some information, so I'll do like Alan suggests ...

I think I will continue to work on debian etch / sid and get back to ubuntu when herd2 is there.
Closing the support request now.