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.
Thanks to wicknix, our users can now benefit from the latest version of Arctic Fox which is 27.10.1 in both 32-bits and 64-bits MintPPC. I just uploaded both versions to the MintPPC repository. The changelog of the latest version can be found here.
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:
The issue of not being able to boot into GRUB on powerpc machines has been fixed in Debian. As a result, the Debian installation images are now working properly. I have created new installation instructions. MintPPC can be installed again. Please test the new installer and report your findings in the forum.
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.
Since the installation media I have online no longer work there is a need to make new installers. I just made a 64-bits installer which I would like to have tested. If you would like to help, write an email to jjhdiederen@zonnet.nl.
Arctic Fox has been updated to version 27.9.19 in the MintPPC repository since today. To get this new version do the following:
sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade
The changelog can be found here. As you can see many bugfixes have been applied. The work is truly impressive. Thanks to wicknix, Ricardo Mottola, xeno74 and m.oudenhoven for bringing this up to date browser to the PowerPC Linux community.
I am continuing the post about trying to make new installer images. I have been trying to achieve this lately and I will tell you what I experienced and what you can expect in the future.
As you are probably well aware of, the Debian installers ditched yaboot and introduced Grub as bootloader. With the installation images which can be downloaded from the official Debian ports place it was possible to still use yaboot until July 2019. The images which I created and can be downloaded from the instructions page are based on the 2019-07-07 Debian images. These images are sort of bridge between the old era and the new era. I could still make those images boot with yaboot and it was still possible to install yaboot at the end or after a reboot.
I am now working with the latest Debian images which can be found in the 2019-11-22 folder. I am also able to make these kind of images myself now. What I found out is that these images cannot be respinned anymore with a yaboot bootloader. For some reason that I am not aware of, the installer does not work properly anymore when booted from yaboot. What I also found out yesterday was that the latest powerpc NETINST image installs MintPPC fine but does not allow me to install yaboot. At least for the moment I can’t do this, maybe I can fix it somehow with another trick. So I can’t boot the newly installed system. I think it is fair to say that I have to say goodbye to my old friend yaboot and start investing time in using Grub. It is never nice to replace something that I am familiar with, and that always did the job, with something new. Things change, so I have to follow I guess.
What I had in mind was to replace the NETINST images with a desktop image, that would allow an installation without the need of downloading all the packages from the internet. I can tell you that that is something I did not achieve. I am perfectly able to spin the same kind of images which Debian produces, i.e. NETINST images, but it is impossible for me to make desktop isos. It is not a huge problem but it would make the installation more predictable. With the NETINST images the person willing to install MintPPC needs to be lucky that all packages which are needed are in a stable state on the Debian ports server. If the installation fails, it is best to look at the syslog and see which package could not be installed. One has to wait then until that package is available in the mirror.
So what can we expect in the future then? What I see coming is an installation image for both powerpc and ppc64, which is based on the latest kernel and kernel modules, i.e. similar to the image that can be downloaded from the 2019-11-22 folder, adapted to install MintPPC. The installation image boots with the help of Grub and the freshly installed MintPPC will also boot by Grub. What I will do now is try to find a way to repair Grub after installation. At the moment Grub is broken on powerpc/ppc64 as it is unable to retrieve the right open firmware path to the hard disk.
I am still working on the project, so please don’t give up on MintPPC. In the future I am sure that knowledegable people can solve the Grub issue and then it will be (almost) no problem at all anymore to install MintPPC (except for the fact that we do not have a stable repository).
On November the 16th I received an email from my internet service provider (ISP) that there was a ticket opened for me. So I opened the ticket and to my surprise I read that my ISP had received a complaint from Google Safe Browsing. They had found an abuse on my domain. It meant that my ISP was about to suspend my website. A few hours later I was shocked to see that they indeed suspended my account and that my website was no longer reachable. I immediately tried to contact them and they told me I had to clean my files and database. Of course I was not extremely happy with this but at least, they gave me an option to do something about the matter. I did not find anything suspicious. I just did what I was told and I cleaned everything and put a backup copy of my site back. Today they finally approved what I did and they made my website visible again. I am pretty sure that I don’t have malicious code in my domain. What I suspect is the following. I run my website at a rather cheap domain, which is www.u58733p55594.web0093.zxcs-klant.nl. The domain web0093.zxcs-klant.nl is known to other ISP’s as a domain where strange things were done in the past and many ISP’s block emails from this domain, probably because spam was sent from there. When I tried to setup my website to be able to send registration mails I noticed that those mails I sent from my domain never arrived. They are immediately filtered and seen as spam. So what I did is I added a module on my site that sends emails via my own gmail account. Many of the registration mails that were sent from my site via gmail were bounced as those ISP’s involved do not accept mails from my domain. I guess that triggered Google. Google thought that I am sending spam mails. I learned my lesson and now I turned off all these mail serving modules. Registration mails will not be sent anymore. It is a small nuisance but it’s better than to be blocked by my ISP.
Recently I bought this beautiful iMac G5 iSight 20 inch. I swapped the custom HDD with a 500 Gb Samsung 850 EVO SSD mounted on a NewerTech AdapaDrive. I also replaced the faulty SuperDrive (thank you ifixit.com for your excellent guides). My idea was to have MintPPC running on this machine together with OSX Leopard, the last MacOS that will run on this machine. So how do we get this accomplished?
Most people will install MintPPC on a Mac which had OSX or OS9 installed on it. In that case, the hard drive has an Apple partitioning scheme, which is visible because the hard disk has the distinct 31.5 kb Apple partition map as the first partition. Gentoo has a nice page explaining all of this. Without this partitioning scheme, Apple New World machines would not be able to boot. So, if you would like to install MintPPC on a hard disk that did not yet have Apple MacOS on it before, you will have to create a partition table on the disk with an Apple partitioning scheme. You can do this from a MacOS installation DVD. Just before installation of MacOS, the installer gives the opportunity to launch Disk Utility. With this program, it is possible to get an Apple partition map on the disk. You can leave the whole disk empty as the MintPPC installer will later on partition the whole drive like you need to.
First install MintPPC according to the Installation Instructions. It is important to leave free space of at least 10Gb for OSX when you are at the partitioning stage. In my case, as it is a G5 iMac, I followed the instructions to partition the drive into seven partitions. I will go into detail as to what they are.
The first partition is the Apple Partition Map, we don’t need to make this one. We now create 6 more partitions.
The first partition which you have to create is a 1Mb NewWorld boot block, flagged as bootable. This partition has a hfs file system and will later be used to install yaboot, a bootloader for PowerPC machines like Macs.
The second partition we will create is a 1Gb ext2 partition mounted at /boot (note that you don’t need this one on G3, G4, see installation instructions). On this partition will reside the kernels and init ram disks.
The third partition we are going to create is a 10 or 20Gb ext4 partition mounted at / (root). This partition will contain all the system files to run Linux.
The fourth partition we will create is the swap partition. This one should be the amount of installed RAM memory and 500 Mb. So in my case, I have 2 Gb RAM, the swap will be 2.5 Gb.
The fifth partition we are going to make is 10 or 20 Gb or anything you like really, as home partition, mounted at /home with an ext4 file system. This partition will be used to host all user files.
The sixth partition that is left should be at least 10 Gb and we will leave it without a file system (empty). Later on, after MintPPC is installed, we will create a hfs+ (journaled hfs) file system on this partition for OSX.
Just follow the instructions for installing MintPPC. Now that we have MintPPC installed and booted into it, we need to install some programs:
sudo apt install gparted hfsplus hfsprogs
Now launch gparted from the menu. Be careful with gparted, it can ruin everything on the disk! In gparted scan the disk. You will see all the partitions. In the empty partition you can now create a hfs+ file system. It will look similar to what I have (I have an extra 8th ext4 partition for mirroring Debian ports).
GParted on my iMac G5 with 500 Gb SSD
Now it is time to get the OSX installation DVD. Reboot into the OSX installer and install OSX in the partition you just formatted. After the installation is finished your Mac will boot into OSX and will not ‘see’ Linux anymore. The OSX installer has reconfigured open firmware to boot directly into OSX. We will have to restore yaboot and make yaboot dual boot OSX and Linux.
Boot again from your MintPPC image and go back to rescue mode (see Installation Instructions for more details). We will do the following again in a shell:
yabootconfig -b /dev/sda2
ybin -v
exit
Now reboot and let the Mac boot from the hard disk. You will have the option now to boot MintPPC, do that. In MintPPC we will now adapt yaboot so it will also give the possibility to boot OSX. For that you need to edit /etc/yaboot.conf and make sure you have the following lines added:
macosx=/dev/sda7 defaultos=linux
You may also set your default operating system to macosx. We will now have to copy these settings into open firmware:
ybin -v
Now reboot one last time and you will see the option to boot into OSX in the yaboot menu. You will now be able to boot in MintPPC as well as OSX. Enjoy !
