Mesa-amber

Good news for MintPPC / Debian users on PowerPC: progress has been made on mesa-amber lately. I was contacted by a fellow called Alexis Lavie, a guy from France who is skilled in Linux and Java. He showed me that he got mesa-amber working on a G4 MDD 2003 with a Radeon 9000 Pro graphics card. He runs XFCE4 with compositor enabled. It means that OpenGL 1.3 is working with the r200 driver on this particular machine. To be able to do this, the unofficial mesa-amber package which is kept on the Debian servers at salsa.debian.org has to be patched to be able to built, that is one thing. I already sent a bug report about this. The other thing, and that is something why mesa-amber never worked on PowerPC on Debian, is that some code had to be added to make it work for this arch. This is something Alexis found out. Together with some other small fixes in the mesa-amber package he was able to create mesa-amber binaries which install next to mainline mesa and which enable a user to get OpenGL working on this very old graphics card on a G4. This is great news for users of Debian / MintPPC. Alexis and I are wrapping things up and will soon publish a detailed page about installing and making mesa-amber work on the G4 MDD 2003 with the Radeon 9000 Pro on this website. I am working to get the required packages on the repo server to make it easy for people to install. Stay tuned!

Edit 13 April 2026: The instructions for mesa-amber on a MDD 2003 G4 are online and can be viewed here.

LMDE 7 updated

Since today users of LMDE 7 arm64 will be able to upgrade to the latest Gigi based on Zena:
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

For people who would like to install the latest LMDE 7 Gigi from scratch using the latest iso image, please send an email. The official announcement by the Linux Mint Team to see what’s new in this release can be found here.

LMDE 7 in UTM on Mac Mini M1

firmware-b43-installer

The package firmware-b43-installer which was in the MintPPC repository did not work anymore for a while. Users of MintPPC could therefore not use the airport card. I deleted the packages from the server. To have a working airport, you need to make sure you have the following line in /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-ports unreleased main

You then need to install firmware-b43-installer from the mentioned repo:

sudo apt install firmware-b43-installer

Updates to LMDE 7

I noticed activity in the packages of Linux Mint Debian Edition 7 on the servers of Linux Mint. It means that we are close to a release of Linux Mint “Zena” and an upgrade to LMDE 7. The most important updates are a renewed menu, a “System Reports” tool to help finding problems and recommended solutions to issues, the adddition of XApp Symbolic Icons (XSI), which are simple, monochrome icons used throughout applications for buttons, menus, and status indicators. Furthermore, cinnamon has been upgraded to 6.6, with improved support for keyboard layouts and input methods. Nemo has been upgraded to 6.6 which features a template manager. Furthermore, in Nemo one can pause and resume file operations from now on. Other improvments: whenever you miss a notification, it now shows a badge in your window list. The workspace switcher applet was improved. Its desktop representation is much clearer than before. Only visible windows are shown, along with their icon. A new configuration tool was implemented to support Thunderbolt. Many more features were added. It can all be seen here.

I will start working on the updates to the arm64 version of LMDE 7. For current users, these updates will become available via the MintPPC repository. In the near future, I will also spin a new LMDE 7 iso with the upgraded packages. If all is done, I will publish it here on the homepage.

VLC

I was able to build the latest VLC for PowerPC, after many years being unable to be built. It was shown to work on the new Mirari board, a PowerPC based computer with the e5500 chip. The Mirari does not have Altivec instructions. The VLC packages were built with Altivec disabled. VLC PowerPC is only available in MintPPC32, not in Debian.