As you are probably aware of, installing MintPPC is not always successful. This has to do with the fact that MintPPC is based on Debian sid, which is the unstable version of Debian. Debian stopped releasing stable versions for the powerpc and ppc64 architectures. What we are dealing with nowadays is Debian-ports. What is Debian-ports you might ask? Well, basically Debian attempts to build all the packages of Debian sid for the officially unsupported arches and hosts them in Debian-ports. These packages are automatically built by buildd. You can have a look at buildd.debian.org to find out the status of a certain package. In the case that a certain source package cannot be built for powerpc and/or ppc64, we might encounter a problem if such a package is needed to install MintPPC. We face these problems on a daily basis. In a stable release, we do not encounter such situations as the maintainers of Debian ‘freeze’ all packages when they are in a stable situation, meaning that all packages can be installed. Only security updates to such packages are allowed.
I would like to be able to ‘freeze’ Debian sid once in a while, when I find out that all packages required for MintPPC are installable from Debian-ports. For this I need to have space and bandwidth on a server. In the case that this is possible, I would like to be able to upload all Debian packages to a repository with enough space and bandwidth. I am talking about gigabytes here. I don’t know the exact amount of space, I will have to find this out later on.
At the moment MintPPC is served from a small repository in the Netherlands. I do this with my own money, it is a hobby project. I cannot host a copy of Debian there, as this would be too costly for me.
I would like to ask someone, who has server space and bandwidth available, to host a copy of Debian powerpc / ppc64 / all packages. It would be handy if such a server is accessible via ssh, so I can rsync Debian-ports at will. It would help users of MintPPC tremendously to make installations hassle-free as at the moment you never know before you start the installation process whether the installation will work or not. This is totally dependent on the state of the packages. If I can host a stable ‘frozen’ state of Debian sid, installation of MintPPC would be always successful.
I hope I made myself clear with the situation MintPPC is in. Please, if you can help me, contact me.
You can also help me by funding MintPPC. If I collect enough money I can upgrade my hosting account so I can host the Debian-ports repository for powerpc/ppc64 myself. If you would like to fund the MintPPC project, please click the “Donate” button.
Best regards,
Jeroen Diederen
jjhdiederen at zonnet dot nl