Good news for MintPPC / Debian users on PowerPC: progress has been made on mesa-amber lately. I was contacted by a fellow called Alexis Lavie, a guy from France who is skilled in Linux and Java. He showed me that he got mesa-amber working on a G4 MDD 2003 with a Radeon 9000 Pro graphics card. He runs XFCE4 with compositor enabled. It means that OpenGL 1.3 is working with the r200 driver on this particular machine. To be able to do this, the unofficial mesa-amber package which is kept on the Debian servers at salsa.debian.org has to be patched to be able to built, that is one thing. I already sent a bug report about this. The other thing, and that is something why mesa-amber never worked on PowerPC on Debian, is that some code had to be added to make it work for this arch. This is something Alexis found out. Together with some other small fixes in the mesa-amber package he was able to create mesa-amber binaries which install next to mainline mesa and which enable a user to get OpenGL working on this very old graphics card on a G4. This is great news for users of Debian / MintPPC. Alexis and I are wrapping things up and will soon publish a detailed page about installing and making mesa-amber work on the G4 MDD 2003 with the Radeon 9000 Pro on this website. I am working to get the required packages on the repo server to make it easy for people to install. Stay tuned!
Edit 13 April 2026: The instructions for mesa-amber on a MDD 2003 G4 are online and can be viewed here.
G5 Macs do not have legacy graphics cards in them as supported by mesa-amber. The cards in G5 Macs are supported by mainline mesa (24.1.6, as found on this site by downgrading mesa, see https://www.u58733p55594.web0093.zxcs-klant.nl/installation/downgrade-mesa/#comment-1572). Only G4 Macs contain graphics cards which are supported by mesa-amber.
The PowerPC libraries for mesa-amber have been uploaded to the MintPPC repository. To install mesa-amber for PowerPC, just install mesa-amber-powerpc. The latter package will install all required libraries to make mesa-amber work next to mainline amber. The detailed instructions are still pending.