Automated installation

Just a few minutes ago an automated installation of MintPPC32 using a preseed file succeeded. I will have to test if the system boots. I will do that tomorrow. It is late here.

Booting the system I see a black screen, blinking cursor…
I have the fix: boot into recovery mode and do the following:
mv /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libglamoregl.so /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libglamoregl.so.bak

Sign of life

Hello world, I am still alive. I just fired up MintPPC32 in an emulator to see if it still working. It is an installation of MintPPC32 of more than a year ago and I immediately ran into a small problem: the debian-ports-archive-keyring had expired. So what I did was, install a new version by manually downloading and installing it.

wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/debian-ports-archive-keyring/debian-ports-archive-keyring_2025.04.05_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i debian-ports-archive-keyring_2025.04.05_all.deb

Now we can update and upgrade
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Apparently 1207 packages need to be upgraded. See if that works…

Update 21.04.2025: around 500 updates except the latest kernel upgraded successfully. I am still booting in kernel 6.5.0.4 after the update. I have to investigate what the problem with the kernel upgrade is. There are 723 more upgrades to follow. Will update soon.

The kernel upgrade problem. I looked at the installation and it appears that the boot partition is read only now so update-grub cannot do its job. To fix this one has to do a file system check on the boot partition. I could not install hfsprogs needed for this operation as I would break the system as the system is in an unconfigured status. I therefore tried to remove linux-image-6.12.22-powerpc but this also failed as /dev/sda2 is read only. Catch 22 problem here it seems. I can’t install hfsprogs it seems. I need an old version of libssl3t64 (3.0.12-2). So, checking snapshot.debian.org now…
I ended up using an older version of hfsprogs and and old version of libssl1. Also that did not fix the boot partition after issuing a

sudo fsck.hfs /dev/sda2

So, I better start from scratch…Installing a completely new system from the 1.4.2025 image. I will keep you updated.

So the lesson I learned from this saga is that the package hfsprogs should always be installed if you have a running system with grub as bootloader. I will make sure that the installation instructions tell people to install this very important program.

XFCE4

Since recently it is possible to run Linux Mint XFCE on top of LXDE.

To install this one has to first install MintPPC. Then:
sudo apt install task-xfce-desktop xfce4-xapp-status-plugin mint-xfce-default-settings
cp -r /etc/skel/.config /home/your_user_name

Logout and login into the XFCE session.

MintPPC XFCE is available for G4 and G5.

SeaLion update

Wicknix released SeaLion 32.5.1. Note that this package has been built in an old Linux environment. To get it working in MintPPC32 I had to do the following:

install libffi7 from snapshots:
wget http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian-ports/20210222T080642Z/pool-powerpc/main/libf/libffi/libffi7_3.3-6_powerpc.deb
sudo dpkg -i libffi7_3.3-6_powerpc.deb

install multiarch-support from snapshots
wget http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian-ports/20190502T022320Z/pool-powerpc/main/g/glibc/multiarch-support_2.28-10_powerpc.deb
sudo dpkg -i multiarch-support_2.28-10_powerpc.deb

install libjpeg8 from snapshots
wget http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20141009T042436Z/pool/main/libj/libjpeg8/libjpeg8_8d1-2_powerpc.deb
sudo dpkg -i libjpeg8_8d1-2_powerpc.deb

I will add sealion 32.5.1 for powerpc to the server. If you want to install this, you will have to do it manually as I do not want to bother too many people with installing all those old libraries.
wget https://www.u58733p55594.web0093.zxcs-klant.nl/wicknix/powerpc/sealion-32.5.1_powerpc.deb
sudo dpkg -i sealion-32.5.1_powerpc.deb

The 64-bits version I still need to check first.

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 a hack to install the grub bootloader manually.

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 took me a while to get the network to work in LXDE but I know now how that is done. If people are interested I can make a page dedicated to achieving this in a verbose manner. The advantage of a systemdless system is a much faster boot, especially on these old devices we use.