Pre-Installation Hardware and Operating System Setup

This section will walk you through pre-installation hardware setup, if any, that you will need to do prior to installing Ubuntu. Generally, this involves checking and possibly changing BIOS/system firmware settings for your system. The “BIOS” or “system firmware” is the core software used by the hardware; it is most critically invoked during the bootstrap process (after power-up).

3.6.1. Invoking OpenFirmware

There is normally no need to set up the BIOS (called OpenFirmware) on PowerPC systems. PReP and CHRP are equipped with OpenFirmware, but unfortunately, the means you use to invoke it vary from manufacturer to manufacturer. You’ll have to consult the hardware documentation which came with your machine.

Chapter 3. Before Installing Ubuntu On PowerPC Macintoshes, you invoke OpenFirmware withCommand (cloverleaf/Apple)-Option-o-fwhile booting. Generally it will check for these keystrokes after the chime, but the exact timing varies from model to model. See http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/macppc/faq.html for more hints.

The OpenFirmware prompt looks like this:

ok 0 >

Note that on older model PowerPC Macs, the default and sometimes hardwired I/O for OpenFirmware user interaction is through the serial (modem) port. If you invoke OpenFirmware on one of these ma-chines, you will just see a black screen. In that case, a terminal program running on another computer, connected to the modem port, is needed to interact with OpenFirmware.

The OpenFirmware on OldWorld Beige G3 machines, OF versions 2.0f1 and 2.4, is broken.

These machines will most likely not be able to boot from the hard drive unless the firmware is patched. A firmware patch is included in the System Disk 2.3.1 utility, available from Apple at ftp://ftp.apple.com/developer/macosxserver/utilities/SystemDisk2.3.1.smi.bin. After unpacking the utility in MacOS, and launching it, select theSavebutton to have the firmware patches installed to nvram.

3.6.2. How to update bare metal ppc64el firmware

This is an excerpt from IBM PowerKVM on IBM POWER8

(https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/tutorials/l-ibm-powerkvm-system-bring-up/).

Open Power Abstraction Layer (OPAL) is the system firmware in the stack of POWER processor-based server.

There may be instances when the user might have to upgrade the Power Systems firmware to a more recent level to acquire new features or additional support for devices.

Make sure that the following requirements are met:

• an OS to be running on the system;

• the .img file of the OPAL level that the user needs to update to;

• the machine isn’t under HMC control.

Power Systems has two sides of flash to boot firmware from, namely permanent and temporary. This provides a way to test firmware updates on the temporary side of the flash before committing the tested changes to the permanent side, thereby committing the new updates.

Perform the following steps for the update:

1. Save the level of the existing firmware before really updating. In ASM, in the system menu, click Service Aids ??? Service Processor Command Line, and run the following command:

cupdcmd -f

2. Download the .img file of the level of firmware to be updated to a location in the host filesystem.

Refer to IBM Fix Central for downloading the image file.

Chapter 3. Before Installing Ubuntu

Verify the image downloaded by running the following command and save the output.

$update_flash -v -f <file_name.img>

3. Update the firmware by running the following command.

$update_flash -f <file_name.img>

Note:

• The command reboots the system and therefore, sessions if any, would be lost.

• Do not reboot or switch off the system until it is back.

4. Verify the updated firmware level of the temporary side of the flash as in step 1.

5. In case the update has to be reverted, the user can do so by running this command:

$update_flash -r

Rejection would reject only the temporary side of the flash. Therefore, the new level should be committed to the permanent side only after thorough testing of the new firmware.

The new updated level can be committed to the permanent side of the flash by running the fol-lowing command.

$update_flash -c

3.6.3. Updating KVM guest firmware (SLOF)

Slimline Open Firmware (SLOF) is an implementation of the IEEE 1275 standard. It can be used as partition firmware for pSeries machines running on QEMU or KVM.

The package qemu-slof is, in fact, a dependency of package qemu-system-ppc (which also provides the virtual package qemu-system-ppc64), and can be installed or updated viaapt-gettool on Debian-based distros. Like so:

# apt-get install qemu-slof

SLOF can also be installed into rpm-based distribution systems, given the proper repository or rpm package. Additionally, the upstream source code is available at http://github.com/leilihh/SLOF.

Thus, one can use a different SLOF file rather than the default, when runningqemu-system, by adding the command line argument-bios <slof_file> when starting qemu.

Chapter 3. Before Installing Ubuntu

3.6.4. Hardware Issues to Watch Out For

Display-visibility on OldWorld Powermacs.Some OldWorld Powermacs, most notably those with the “control” display driver, may not reliably produce a colormap under Linux when the display is configured for more than 256 colors. If you are experiencing such issues with your display after rebooting (you can sometimes see data on the monitor, but on other occasions cannot see anything) or, if the screen turns black after booting the installer instead of showing you the user interface, try changing your display settings under MacOS to use 256 colors instead of “thousands” or “millions”.

Chapter 4. Obtaining System Installation Media

4.1. Official Ubuntu CD-ROMs

By far the easiest way to install Ubuntu is from an Official Ubuntu CD-ROM (http://releases.ubuntu.com/xenial/). You may download the CD-ROM image from an Ubuntu mirror and make your own CD, if you have a fast network connection and a CD burner. If you have an Ubuntu CD and CDs are bootable on your machine, you can skip right toChapter 5; much effort has been expended to ensure the files most people need are there on the CD.

If your machine doesn’t support CD booting, but you do have a CD, you can use an alternative strategy such as hard disk, net boot, or manually loading the kernel from the CD to initially boot the system installer. The files you need for booting by another means are also on the CD; the Ubuntu network archive and CD folder organization are identical. So when archive file paths are given below for particular files you need for booting, look for those files in the same directories and subdirectories on your CD.

Once the installer is booted, it will be able to obtain all the other files it needs from the CD.

If you don’t have a CD, then you will need to download the installer system files and place them on the hard disk or a connected computer so they can be used to boot the installer.

4.2. Downloading Files from Ubuntu Mirrors

To find the nearest (and thus probably the fastest) mirror, see the list of Ubuntu mirrors (http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Archive).

When downloading files from an Ubuntu mirror using FTP, be sure to download the files inbinary mode, not text or automatic mode.

4.2.1. Where to Find Installation Images

The installation images are located on each Ubuntu mirror in the

directory ubuntu/dists/xenial/main/installer-powerpc/current/images/

(http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/dists/xenial/main/installer-powerpc/current/images)

— the MANIFEST (http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/dists/xenial/main/installer-powerpc/current/images/MANIFEST) lists each image and its purpose.

4.3. Preparing Files for Hard Disk Booting

The installer may be booted using boot files placed on an existing hard drive partition, either launched from another operating system or by invoking a boot loader directly from the BIOS.

A full, “pure network” installation can be achieved using this technique. This avoids all hassles of removable media, like finding and burning CD images or struggling with too numerous and unreliable floppy disks.

Chapter 4. Obtaining System Installation Media