Installing Void Linux on the iBook G4

After not having luck with Adélie Linux, I gave Void Linux a shot. And it worked flawlessly. I was amazed how well the documentation of this distribution was written. To get started, I downloaded the void-live-ppc-20210825-xfce.iso found here and wrote the file using balena Etcher onto a 16GB USB stick.

I was able to boot from USB using the following commands:

devalias ud /pci@2000000/usb@1b,1/disk@1
boot ud:,\boot\grub.img

The boot took a couple minutes with a spinning wheel indicating that the files are appropriately loading.

I was able to login as the anon user with the voidlinux password. After login I have opened a terminal and changed to root using sudo su.

The installer is then started by

# void-installer

I have a 56 GB harddisk in this iBook. This is why I have chosen the following partitioning.

# pmac-fdisk /dev/sdX
i
C 2p 10M bootstrap Apple_Bootstrap
c 3p 50G rootfs                    # root filesystem (/)
c 4p 4G swap                       # remaining (4G) unused space as swap
w
q

After the installation of the main system I have installed some additional packages:

# xbps-install -Su
# xbps-install -S openntpd
# ln -s /etc/sv/ntpd /var/service/
# xbps-install -S socklog-void
# ln -s /etc/sv/socklog-unix /var/service/
# ln -s /etc/sv/nanoklogd /var/service/
# xbps-install PopCorn
# ln -s /etc/sv/popcorn /var/service/
# xbps-install pbbuttonsd
# ln -s /etc/sv/pbbuttonsd /var/service/
# xbps-install mouseemu
# ln -s /etc/sv/mouseemu /var/service/
# xbps-install alsa-utils

Wifi was a little bit more tricky, because using void-packages did not work at the binary-bootstrap step, were it had to be started as normal user, but needed elevated rights to lock the database. This is why I chose the manual way. Additionally, only the classic firmware was able to connect to wifi networks.

# xbps-install b43-fwcutter
$ mkdir broadcom_fw && cd broadcom_fw
$ xbps-uhelper fetch http://www.lwfinger.com/b43-firmware/broadcom-wl-5.100.138.tar.bz2
$ tar xf broadcom-wl-*.tar.bz2
# b43-fwcutter -w /usr/lib/firmware linux/wl_apsta.o

I am really impressed how flawlessly this worked out.

neofetch