systemd-less and temporary installation instructions

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 …

Sysvinit – no systemd

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 …

Fixed lxpanel lxpanel-data

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 …

Grub failure

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 …

Slow airport connection

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 …

Email clients MintPPC32

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 …