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.