Fast and slick Linux for PowerPC and ARM64
For the people who would like to try booting with sysvinit instead of systemd I wrote a page dedicated to this. The instructions can also be used to install MintPPC under the current circumstances as debian-installer is broken: grub installation fails again. With the instructions of systemd-less installation one can also install MintPPC by using …
Continue reading “systemd-less and temporary installation instructions”
Lately I have been experimenting with a Debian sid ppc64 system without systemd. Systemd is the default nowadays in Debian. In the old days all ‘services’ or ‘daemons’ were managed by init scripts. I was able to install sysvinit and to dump systemd from a base Debian install. I then installed a desktop (LXDE). It …
I tried to install MintPPC and Debian a couple of times with the snapshot installer images of June 18 2023 as is prescribed in the instructions. At the end of the installation, the installation of grub fails. I tried 4 times to make sure. Don’t do an installation now as it will fail 100%.
I amended the mintsystem package to include apt pinning settings for lxpanel, lxpanel-data and the airport drivers. They will be installed in /etc/apt/preferences.d/99-mintppc.pref. From now on these packages will not be automatically removed by upgrading from Debian sources.
I built new lxpanel and lxpanel-data from source, patched by numerous patches as found upstream in lxde-continued. There is a bug report in Debian reporting these patches. These packages have been added to the repositories of MintPPC32 and MintPPC64, so they will be automatically installed on your computer. Numerous problems are fixed now, for example …
I tried an apt upgrade and it tried to upgrade grub-ieee1275 on a G5 iMac (ppc64) which failed. Setting up grub-ieee1275 (2.12~rc1-12) …Installing for powerpc-ieee1275 platform.grub-install: error: cannot backup `/boot/grub/powerpc-ieee1275/adler32.mod’: Read-only file system.Failed: grub-install –target=powerpc-ieee1275WARNING: Bootloader is not properly installed, system may not be bootable/usr/sbin/grub-mkconfig: 274: cannot create /boot/grub/grub.cfg.new: Read-only file systemdpkg: error processing package grub-ieee1275 (–configure): installed grub-ieee1275 package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 2 Also during …
If you are having trouble with a slow internet connection with your wireless airport card, you might want to upgrade firmware-b43-installer or firmware-b43legacy-installer, depending on what you use. It has to be either b43 or b43legacy. I ported an older version (019-3) and renamed it to a version later than 019-8, so it can be …
I forgot to add an important line in the /etc/apt/sources.list in the installation instructions. Add the following line:deb https://deb.debian.org/debian-ports unreleased main
As with MintPPC64 I have been testing the email clients that are available to us. I am not very impressed by SeaMail and SpiderMail in the sid environment. It often crashes and the programs cannot remember the email password for retrieving new mails. I can only really recommend sylpheed. I will remove SeaMail and SpiderMail …
For those of you who would like to install MintPPC on top of Debian sid, there are instructions how to do this. I updated the page to make it work better.