MintPPC

Some people report that openGL is no longer working in current Debian sid. For those of you who would like to downgrade mesa to 24.1.6 (reported to still work for powerpc) can do the following.

Download the mesa script and perform it as sudo. The script will add an entry for an extra repository hosted on this website for the mesa packages. It will downgrade the mesa packages. Furthermore the script will hold those packages from being automatically upgraded.

wget http://u58733p55594.web0093.zxcs-klant.nl/mesa/mesa
chmod u+x mesa
sudo ./mesa

This only works in MintPPC32.

Preparatory work on porting LMDE 6 to the PowerPC arch has begun. The idea behind this project is that this distribution will run on modern PowerPC computers like Mirari and the PowerPC-notebook.
LMDE 6 PPC ships with a cinnamon desktop. The porting comprises most packages as found in Linux Mint Debian Edition 6. Some packages will not be included in LMDE 6 PPC. The serious work (i.e. compiling arch dependent packages) has been done. The packages have been uploaded to the MintPPC server and installation tests will be done. I will update soon with more information.

As CUPS has been broken for a while and a user called Poe Tam asked me to help him, I decided to build a stable version of CUPS for MintPPC32. As of now all users in MintPPC32 can install CUPS successfully.

Edit 3 May 2025
CUPS can now be safely upgraded completely to 2.4.10 as today it was possible to build the packages from source successfully.

When booting SeaLion or ArcticFox from the command line it always complains that the program cannot find the theme engine murrine in module_path. The solution to this minor problem is to install gtk2-engines-murrine.

Both versions of MintPPC can now upgrade to ArcticFox 45.3. The 64-bits version was compiled by Christian Zigotzky.

MintPPC32 users are now automatically upgraded to SeaLion 33.6.2.

For MintPPC32 users who would like to upgrade SeaLion from 32.5.0, which is installed by default, one can download it from here.
To have SeaLion 33.6.1 working one needs to install an old library (libjpeg.so.8 in /usr/lib/powerpc-linux-gnu/). It can be retrieved here.

For MintPPC64 users the upgrade goes automatically.

Just a few minutes ago an automated installation of MintPPC32 using a preseed file succeeded. I will have to test if the system boots. I will do that tomorrow. It is late here.

Booting the system I see a black screen, blinking cursor…
I have the fix: boot into recovery mode and do the following:
mv /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libglamoregl.so /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libglamoregl.so.bak

To have a good working system, one needs to have a good sources.list in /etc/apt. Make sure it looks like this for MintPPC32.
link to picture

For MintPPC64 it looks like this.
link to picture

Hello world, I am still alive. I just fired up MintPPC32 in an emulator to see if it still working. It is an installation of MintPPC32 of more than a year ago and I immediately ran into a small problem: the debian-ports-archive-keyring had expired. So what I did was, install a new version by manually downloading and installing it.

wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/debian-ports-archive-keyring/debian-ports-archive-keyring_2025.04.05_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i debian-ports-archive-keyring_2025.04.05_all.deb

Now we can update and upgrade
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Apparently 1207 packages need to be upgraded. See if that works…

Update 21.04.2025: around 500 updates except the latest kernel upgraded successfully. I am still booting in kernel 6.5.0.4 after the update. I have to investigate what the problem with the kernel upgrade is. There are 723 more upgrades to follow. Will update soon.

The kernel upgrade problem. I looked at the installation and it appears that the boot partition is read only now so update-grub cannot do its job. To fix this one has to do a file system check on the boot partition. I could not install hfsprogs needed for this operation as I would break the system as the system is in an unconfigured status. I therefore tried to remove linux-image-6.12.22-powerpc but this also failed as /dev/sda2 is read only. Catch 22 problem here it seems. I can’t install hfsprogs it seems. I need an old version of libssl3t64 (3.0.12-2). So, checking snapshot.debian.org now…
I ended up using an older version of hfsprogs and and old version of libssl1. Also that did not fix the boot partition after issuing a

sudo fsck.hfs /dev/sda2

So, I better start from scratch…Installing a completely new system from the 1.4.2025 image. I will keep you updated.

So the lesson I learned from this saga is that the package hfsprogs should always be installed if you have a running system with grub as bootloader. I will make sure that the installation instructions tell people to install this very important program.