I want to build omnibus powerpc packages. I do not own a Mac G4 or anything like that so QEMU is my best option.

Downlaod Wheezy PowerPC VM

Someone at Debian does a nice job building one Debian Wheezy powerpc Qcow2 image.

Install QEMU Debs

apt-get install qemu-system-ppc
apt-get install openbios-ppc

Then run

qemu-system-ppc -hda debian_wheezy_powerpc_standard.qcow2 -boot c -m 1024

QEMU came up, but I got nothing but a blank screen on the QEMU window.

Get Latest OpenBios PPC file

The problem is that the openbios-ppc version Ubuntu 14.04 uses is old.

I got the latest openbios-ppc binary from qemu github site and installed it in /usr/share/openbios

Setup a Reverse SSH session.

QEMU default networking does not allow you to ssh from the KVM host to the VM. I am not sure why. When I do find the reason, I will link the answer to this post.

Login on the QEMU console as with username root and password root. Start the Reverse SSH session. You can have the reverse ssh tunnel come by default by installing autossh in /etc/rc.local. Configure public key SSH authentication between the VM and KVM host as well if you want to use autossh.

root@debian-powerpc:~# route -n
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
0.0.0.0         10.0.2.2        0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 eth0
10.0.2.0        0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 eth0

root@debian-powerpc:~# ssh -fN -R5000:localhost:22 stanley@10.0.2.2 -p22

From the KVM Host login into Debian PPC VM

$ ssh root@localhost -p 5000

Trying to get omnibus to work with Debian Wheezy is hard. So far failed at getting dependencies compiled correctly such as

  • Vagrant 1.2 or higher
  • Ruby2.1 from Jessie source. Works if I use RVM

I may revisit this issue when I can get Debian Jessie to load in a PPC VM. So far no luck.