Today, I finally semi-sucessfully completed a build of a PPC LiveCD using Gentoo’s Catalyst tool. Catalyst is a bear to get used to. It took me about 3 days to finally get this cd to boot. It’s just a rather steep learning curve and confusing documentation. I submitted a bug as a request to fix it.

See the good stuff!

I said semi-sucessfully, because it’s not perfect by any means. It uses the current toolchain for PPC (GCC-3.4.4, binutils-2.15.90, glibc-2.3.4). It also has distcc on the disc, ready to use. As an added bonus, distcc has been patched with support for ZeroConf Networking. That means, that when configured correctly, distccd will tell Howl that it will provide service to the local subnet. Any other distcc that is patched will automatically discover that host and add it to the host list.

There are some caveats. Like I said….semi-sucessfully. Currently, these are the steps you must take before trying to compile anything.

Boot the cd (Duh!) Configure DISTCC_HOSTS example : export DISTCC_HOSTS = “+zeroconf” Configure distccd: You must edit /etc/conf.d/distccd and add “–zeroconf” to DISTCCD_OPTS. Optionally edit /etc/init.d/distccd. Add the line ‘need mDNSResponder’ to the depend() function. If you edited distccd init script, just , else start mDNSResponder first, then distccd. Setup other hosts. Compile! I use this on spare G4 processors in my apartment. On my laptop, which is where I do my main compiling, I have patched distcc and use it with Portage. You can find the patch here with some minimal documentation. Let me know how this works for you.

This works on my G4 15″ Alum. PowerBook and my 1st gen Mac Mini. Your mileage may vary. There is no warranty…I mean..it’s free, what more do you want? It may work on G3 processors. It may make them explode into bits. I don’t know. I have no G3 systems to test it on. It likely won’t work on G5’s. If it does, then it certainly isn’t optimized for them.

Things for me to do (I gladly accept help ): - Add more toolchains, specifically a GCC-4.x toolchain, some x86 toolchains. - Add more platform support. I’d like to be able to boot my Athlons and compile for my powerbook with them. Also, I’ve seen a toolchain on the Inet for compiling for OS X. - Modify the source to include the platform in the Zeroconf TXT record or service advertisement.

Download You can download the ISO here. Please take it easy though, it’s 75.9 MB file. Please distribute it on P2P networks if you find this useful.

In case you were wondering about the name: I needed to name it something, because diskimage.iso wasn’t working out too well. Since I was going to use this on my P-P-P-Powerbook, I though the extra ‘P’ would be nice. The ‘entoo’ came from Gentoo, obviously. Together, they kinda sound like ‘plenty’, which describes on the amount of CPU cylces you’ll have once you get this running!