MintPPC

Considering that the default Mint-X-Openbox theme as it came with Linux Mint LXDE 12 is becoming somehow old, I thought it was a good idea to start looking for some new minty themes.

On box-look.org I came across some variations to the default Mint-X-Openbox theme. What I personally don’t like very much about it is the grey fonts in the title bar of the windows. I switched to MintZ, which can be found as follows.

Open from the Menu under Preferences: Customize Look and Feel (LXAppearance).

Select the tab Window Border and go through the list. I selected MintZ. I like the dark font better as it is much more readable.

With the next update of mint-lxde-artwork, you will be able to do these minor changes.

After upgrading your packages you will be able to select the latest mint-cursor-themes. You can do this by opening LXappearance from the menu (Customize Look and Feel) and change the cursor to Bibata Modern Classic. You will have to log out from the Mint-LXDE session and log back in to have it working across all applications. Your desktop will now look like the latest Linux Mint.

I got the following error message:

W: http://u58733p55594.web0093.zxcs-klant.nl/repo/dists/unstable/InRelease: Key is stored in legacy trusted.gpg keyring (/etc/apt/trusted.gpg), see the DEPRECATION section in apt-key(8) for details.

To fix this problem, do the following:

sudo apt-key export D7A223ABAA7CE436 | sudo gpg --dearmour -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/mintppc.gpg

Lately I have been working on testing new installer images provided by Debian-Ports. I have read that many people tried to install MintPPC with the netinstaller and that it no longer worked. I can confirm this and it is not easy to fix everything.

It requires more work than I thought. Many more programs are no longer available in debian-ports (removed from sid or it cannot be built by buildd) so I have to either compile them myself or chose not to install them. Also other problems and tweaks are necessary. The installation works now, but not everything I want gets installed. I will continue the battle. I will give another update soon. The end result should be similar as how MintPPC looked before but now in a LMDE6 (Faye) environment, which by the way was just officially released. MintPPC will however stay with LXDM and LXDE as Cinnamon is a bridge too far for our old Macs.

Update 4.10.2023
The installer works now. Have a look at the updated installation instructions.

If you happen to be unlucky and you upgraded some mint packages which were on the repository for a little while, you may have noticed that the login screen does not work anymore. I am sorry, I was a bit too quick with upgrading mint packages and uploading them to my server. I had not yet tested it thoroughly. The problem is that by upgrading some mint packages, lxdm, the login manager, now uses gtk3 and will no longer work with some configurations of mint-lxde. If you like to fix this yourself, do the following.

wget u58733p55594.web0093.zxcs-klant.nl/lxdm/greeter-gtk3.ui
sudo mv greeter-gtk3.ui /usr/share/lxdm/themes/Mint-LXDE/

In the near future I will upgrade mint-artwork-lxde to have this done automatically.

Update 1.10.2023

Upgrading mint-artwork-lxde from the repository will fix this problem for you.

The following packages were upgraded in the repository:

Arctic-Fox
b43-fwcutter
firmware-amd-graphics
firmware-b43-installer
firmware-b43legacy-installer
firmware-linux-nonfree
firmware-linux
firmware-misc-nonfree
SpiderMail

The following package was added:
SeaLion

Update 29.09.2023
For an unknown reason, arcticfox, spidermail and sealion cannot be found in the repository. I am working on a solution. For the moment the packages can be installed manually from the pool directory in http://u58733p55594.web0093.zxcs-klant.nl/repo.

Update 01.10.2023
To have access to spidermail, arcticfox and sealion, provided by wicknix and rmottola, do the following. Add the following line in /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://www.u58733p55594.web0093.zxcs-klant.nl/wicknix ./
sudo apt update
sudo apt install arcticfox sealion spidermail

Today I fired up my PowerBook G4 again to see if I can get some progress. The MintPPC system is totally broken at this moment. The main problem is that various packages in my system require Perl 5.30 but the upgrade wants to install something of a higher version. So what I did was manually deleting all the packages that require this old version of Perl and all the other broken things. This took me a couple of hours. After this I could upgrade most packages to the latest version. My PowerBook G4 cannot handle too much heat. The configuring of tex apparently locked up my machine. I tried a few times but each time I get the same. I need to let the computer cool down and try again.

The next time I should be able to configure all my packages and upgrade the remaining 50 or so packages.

I then need to rewrite some code in the specific MintPPC packages to make them work again in the latest sid.

To be continued…

Update 16 September 2023
Fortunately I was able to upgrade all packages today. I could get my system in a clean state. I then turned to the MintPPC specific programs and they installed without any problem. It means that all packages, which are on the repository server, are up to date for the latest Debian sid environment. There is no need to upgrade the mint packages. What I did notice was that the latest 6 kernel (6.5.0-3) had a kernel panic at boot. I had to go back to a 5 kernel. I will have a look if I can find something about this problem in the Debian lists.

So I found my develop PowerBook G4 onto which I made MintPPC. I haven’t touched this machine for a long time. I will start posting some updates to what I am doing. I will first update the sources.list in /etc/apt/sources.list. As the keyring has been expired I first need to update to the latest Debian ports archive keyring for sid. It can be found here:
https://packages.debian.org/sid/debian-ports-archive-keyring

wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/debian-ports-archive-keyring/debian-ports-archive-keyring_2023.02.01_all.deb

sudo dpkg -i debian-ports-archive-keyring_2023.02.01_all.deb

sudo apt update

1294 packages can be upgraded. Let’s see if that works:

sudo apt upgrade

Apparently that does not work, as some packages cannot be installed. exfat-utils conflicts, exfatprogs but 1.2.1-2 is to be installed.

sudo apt install exfatprogs

exfat-utils 1.3.0-2 is removed by this action

sudo apt upgrade

1111 upgraded, 81 newly installed , 0 to remove and 183 not upgraded, let’s go…

Day 2

Ok that worked only partially. Lots of broken dependencies. I did the following:

sudo apt upgrade --fix-broken

That also worked partially as some programs are not configured yet, so I issued a

sudo dpkg --configure -a

There are still some programs that cannot be configured due to dependency problems.

I cannot get it configured as I receive the following error:
Perl v5.32.0 required–this is only 5.30.3 stopped at ….

and more packages that cannot be configured due to this Perl version.

apparently there are some packages that require perl 5.30 or lower

sudo apt install perl

the following packages have unmet dependencies:
libclass-xcaccessor-perl : depends perl (< 5.40.4) but 5.36.0-8 is to be installed, same for
libcommon-sense-perl
libpod-constants-perl

Hi!

Here is a new test image [1] which is supposed to test the proper partitioning
of the HFS boot partition and mounting it to /boot/grub.

Note: This image will *not* install GRUB yet properly. The purpose of this image
      is just to test whether the changes I made to the package partman-auto and
      the new packages hfsprogs-udeb and partman-hfs work correctly.

If everything works as intended, the partitioning program should automatically
create and format a GRUB boot partition and mount it to /boot/grub. If that’s
the case, I can commit the changes to partman-auto and submit the new partman-hfs
package to unstable.

After that, I can work on the necessary changes to the grub-installer package which
conclude the changes necessary to fix the GRUB installation on Apple PowerMac.

Adrian

[1] https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/tests/hfstest-20210411/

— 
 .”`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :’ :  Debian Developer – glaubitz@debian.org
`. `’   Freie Universitaet Berlin – glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
  `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913

Could you please try the new installer images and report back any issues? You might want to install plain Debian or MintPPC, up to you.
Link to images