Linux Mint arm64

Recently I ported Linux Mint Xia, running in a Debian trixie base, to arm64. I am working on a solution to get Linux Mint running in a VM like Parallels and UTM on silicon macs with almost native speed. A test version is ready and being tested. In the future, I will sell disk images for Parallels and UTM, maybe also VMWARE. These images will contain Linux Mint Debian Edition 7 (Gigi). Stay tuned for this.

Automated installations fail

For some reason, my repository pages are now redirected to ssl, which will lead to a failure in automated installations. I don’t know how to fix this at the moment. Please install MintPPC manually.

It is very likely that my hosting provider now redirects all traffic via ssl. Previously, the repo pages were set to not use https by me with a .htaccess file in the root of these repo pages. This was working fine until a week ago the provider changed the settings. If someone here reading this willing to help, he/she could offer web space via http and ftp so I can host the repo somewhere else. I cannot change these settings.

Be aware with next upgrade

Please be aware that during a next upgrade in your system, Debian tries to install a new version of Grub. The installation of Grub-ieee1275 will lead to a corrupted boot partition. Immediately after installation make sure you have hfsprogs installed, if not:
sudo apt install hfsprogs
Then repair the boot partition:
sudo fsck.hfs /dev/sda2
See here.

If you don’t repair your boot partition, you risk that your MintPPC system won’t be able to boot anymore.

Update 21 June: Another upgrade installed a new /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libglamoregl.so messing up X. I had to rename it again into libglamoregl.so.bak.

Downgrade mesa

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.

MintPPC32:
wget https://u58733p55594.web0093.zxcs-klant.nl/mesa/mesa
chmod u+x mesa
sudo ./mesa

MintPPC64:
wget https://u58733p55594.web0093.zxcs-klant.nl/mesa-64/mesa-64
chmod u+x mesa-64
sudo ./mesa-64

This fix will not work in plain Debian as in plain Debian the public key for the MintPPC repository is missing. One has to first import the key (see manual installation MintPPC).

LMDE 6 PPC

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.

This port is based on Debian unstable (sid), just like MintPPC, as there is no longer a stable powerpc Debian release since “Jessie”, i.e. Debian 8, released in 2015.

CUPS

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.