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.

Software manager

To get red of the Software Manager icon in the menu, do the following. Update mint-lxde-default-settings to version 12.0.11.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

For existing users, you have to copy the .config file in /etc/skel into the user´s home folder. If you do it for yourself, it has to be done like this:

cp -r /etc/skel/.config ~

Logout and login and you will see that the non-working Software Manager icon has disappeared.

When new users are created, this icon will not be shown anymore.

Upcoming updates

Happy Whit Monday!

We are in June 2020 and what that means is that the Linux Mint team will release version 20 of its distribution, coded “Ulyana” this month. As soon as it is available I will start working on porting the artistic stuff into MintPPC. It is for this reason I would like to ask you if there are things you like to have improved. What I intend for example is to remove “Software Manager” as option in the Menu, as the program will not be ported and it is too bloated anyway. Another thing that you will see is a new Linux Mint Menu icon on the left side of the panel. The present icon is based on older versions of Linux Mint. The new one, which was designed for Linux Mint “Tricia” looks much prettier and is round. For info on the logo design, have a look here.
That’s it for now.

Small addition after announcement

Yesterday I found out that I forgot to include a small app in the panel which shows when there are updates in the system. It works very similarly to the tool used in Linux Mint, the package is called package-update-indicator and will as of now be installed automatically in MintPPC. For those of you who installed MintPPC in the last couple of days but do not yet have this small handy app I would recommend to do the following:

sudo apt install package-update-indicator

Debian installer finally being worked on

As I write this new post, Adrian Glaubitz has been working hard within the Debian community to make the installer work for ppc users. Apparently, the GRUB issue has been solved now finally. I have not had the time to do a test myself yet. I will do this as soon as I think that the time is right. If it all works as expected, I will make new MintPPC installer images.

To be continued…