Grub problem

I just tried to install MintPPC on a gifted PowerBook G4 (thanks Martin from Austria). I found out the the grub-installer failed to install grub. It is unfortunate that people do not report this. It is possible that MintPPC was not installable for months. If I would have known this, I could have looked at this issue much earlier.

The problem has been fixed.

isight-firmware-tools

Today I built isight-firmware-tools for ppc64 and added it to the 64-bits repository. Apple Built-in iSight requires firmware that can be extracted from the Mac OS X USBVideo driver. This package provides tools for extracting the firmware from the driver and installing udev rules and tools to automatically load the firmware when needed. I tested the program and it works. The isight.fw file will be put in /lib/firmware. My iSight camera in the G5 iMac works well in Cheese with this installed firmware.


For more information have a look at the Ubuntu wiki site.

Help: server space and bandwidth needed!

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.

Best regards,
Jeroen Diederen
jjhdiederen at zonnet dot nl

MintPPC has been updated

To have all the new goodies in an existing MintPPC installation do the following (note: it will overwrite your settings):
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
cp -r /etc/skel/.config ~

Logout and login and enjoy!

Extra background pictures can be added by installing mint-backgrounds-tricia.

Installing MintPPC from scratch will give the updated MintPPC as well.

Updates include the following:
* Updated mint-x-icons and mint-y-icons
* Updated mint-lxde-default-settings to have “Software Manager” removed as option from the menu and to have a new Menu icon with the round Linux Mint logo, which ships standard with Linux Mint nowadays, as well as settings for a different wallpaper as default both in Mint-LXDE and in the display manager.
* Updated mint-artwork-lxde with a new logout banner, which I designed myself
* Updated mint-artwork (with new mint logos)
* Updated mint-themes
* included mint-backgrounds-tricia and mint-backgrounds-ulyana (nice HD wallpapers suitable for the desktop)

I refer to the changelog of the corresponding Linux Mint packages for details (the lxde specific packages I maintain myself).

The changes are all about the looks. Under the hood MintPPC is Debian sid.