MintPPC

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.

As of today, users of MintPPC can install Minitube, a small standalone program to watch youtube videos without the need of flash. I built a 32 and 64 bits version of this program and they are in the wicknix and xeno74 repos. For more information about this program look here.

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).

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.

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