Recently I bought this beautiful iMac G5 iSight 20 inch. I swapped the custom HDD with a 500 Gb Samsung 850 EVO SSD mounted on a NewerTech AdapaDrive. I also replaced the faulty SuperDrive (thank you ifixit.com for your excellent guides). My idea was to have MintPPC running on this machine together with OSX Leopard, …
Category Archives: Installation
Experimenting with building installer images
As we all know, powerpc and ppc64 are no longer officially supported by Debian. Adrian Glaubitz does a great job to mirror the packages for the supported architectures to Debian-ports. There is a price to pay though: not everything works as it used to be when powerpc had official releases. There are two things that …
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MintPPC for G5 works
You can start downloading the 64-bits iso and install MintPPC / 64 as it has been tested: it works now.
MintPPC for G5 not working yet
Yesterday it was “saxfun” in the Macrumors forum who successfully installed MintPPC for the first time on his PowerBook G4. It shows that the MintPPC installation image for G3 and G4, which is 32-bits, works well. Another person (MacBoer on the same forum) tried the 64-bits image on his G5 iMac but he was unsuccessful. …
Installer
What a journey it is to get MintPPC automatically installed. Yesterday I finally made a breakthrough. The installer is now able to detect my local repository, the Debian-ports repository, to add the required keys and to start downloading and installing all required packages to get to the MintPPC desktop. There is still one problem, which …
Manual installation MintPPC
I will give some guidance on how to manually install the Mint layer on top of Debian sid. Debian sid can be installed as described in my other post. There is a glitch in video now. We need to fix that first. Boot the system in recovery mode and do the following: mv /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libglamoregl.so /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libglamoregl.so.bak …
Installation woes
For the past couple of days I have been trying to get MintPPC installed in an easy way onto my iBook. I found out that using a preseed file with a repository elsewhere won’t work as the modern Debian netinstaller does not accept repositories as the installer environment does not have gpg to its disposal. …
Installing Debian sid LXDE
For those of you who are willing to go down the rabbit hole, I hereby present a quick guide to get Debian sid with an LXDE desktop installed reliably on PowerPC based computers. Quick installation guide Install an lxde-desktop with the latest sid image:G3/G4: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/snapshots/2025-04-01/debian-12.0.0-powerpc-NETINST-1.isoG5: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/snapshots/2025-04-01/debian-12.0.0-ppc64-NETINST-1.isoolder working images:https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/snapshots/2023-06-18/debian-12.0.0-powerpc-NETINST-1.iso and the corresponding pp64 variant at the …