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Screenshot from 2023-11-11 14-51-37.png


MintPPC32 from within my ASUS laptop with QEMU
 
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Hey just installed on a new machine with no issues…well there is one and that is your airport drivers…the versions you are using are incredibly unsable which is why if you install a vanilla Debian today you won’t be able to install the latest airport driver because the packages are held back the Debian team due the slownesscompataibulity issues….hence the reason the fienix developer states fienix Linux does not supoirt airport out of the box…you may have noticed the WiFi is slow when browsing using arcticfox or sealion…the reason is the airport driver version your preseed isntalls. You have to use the airport driver versions that are in the Debian wiki here on Mac rumors. Every time I install the first thing I do is uninstall your driver versions because the internet is soooooo slowww…once those versions are uninstalled and the specific versions are installed the internet is normal again…just thought you might wanna know because I’ve seen you post in other threads asking wicknix how to speed up the internet…the reason for the slowness is not your internet or the browser it’s the driver versions…I attached the download links below for the correct driver versions…you have prevent those drivers from being updating from Sid’s repos as once the specific versions are install synaptic/update manager wil go off saying updates are bailable and attempt to update to the latest broken drivers. I usually issue a command to prevent them from updating but there’s multiple ways accomplishing…I don’t know how preseed works but I’m sure you probably already know haha. I really do appreciate your work….you are seriously awesome 😎
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/the-powerpc-debian-wiki.2178457/

Underfixes you’ll see the fwcutter and airport driver…I lock the the drivers synaptic to prevent the system from automatically using the latest versions from your repository and issue dpkg -i to install the specific driver versions from the debs. Hope that helps! Oh and last but not leaste do not install the legacy package…there should be two debs/drivers installed for airport..I noticed your preseed installs all three….fwcutter, b43firmware and legacyb43…you wanna remove the legacy from installing from the preseed….that needs to be removed before those airport versions are installed
 
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Download 1

Download 2

Ohhh was gunna say one more thing…not sure if your a power user or someone who likes a little more out of your email but Ubuntu use to ship evolution mail…it’s available and works really well…not sure if you knew. Have a good one and thanks again bud!
 
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@Tankerthebuberz Thank you very much for this information. I didn’t know about this. I will use these packages from now on. I will also remove b43-legacy. You don’t have to be afraid that these packages will be upgraded as they will only be on my server. MintPPC does not install the Debian contrib repository.
Do you know if this older version of b43 also works better for ppc64?
 
I have a question for you guys here. Is there interest in a recent image of MintPPC, either 32- or 64-bits. I have two images on my Google drive to download but they become old now (2019). If there is interest I can make a new one from an existing qcow2 file I created in QEMU. I need however volunteers to try this out, as I never used such formats before. I can convert these qcow2 images to a raw .img file, which can then be dd-ed onto a hard drive as explained on the page Installation of MintPPC with live USB.
Oh then what is this. You said you needed people to test images….i thought that’s what this was?
 
Right I understand. You asked for people to volunteer to try an updated image if there was interest. I am interested because I have machines that are not on network. I’m an IT admin and I’ve used Linux and have been in the industry 20+ years. So yes I’m interested if you decide to move forward your side project it would be useful for me in certain situations lol. I was just responding a question you asked everyone…wasn’t sure if you were looking for someone with advanced knowledge to test images I’m offering myself as tribute lol
 
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There are instructions how to do it. It is basically dd-ing the whole disk image onto a hard drive, making swap, increasing the root partition and adapting the fstable.
 
No man I understand… You asked the community a question and I was just answering your question man! You asked if there was interest and I was just answering yes lol …Sounds good thank you
 
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Hey just installed on a new machine with no issues…well there is one and that is your airport drivers…the versions you are using are incredibly unsable which is why if you install a vanilla Debian today you won’t be able to install the latest airport driver because the packages are held back the Debian team due the slownesscompataibulity issues….hence the reason the fienix developer states fienix Linux does not supoirt airport out of the box…you may have noticed the WiFi is slow when browsing using arcticfox or sealion…the reason is the airport driver version your preseed isntalls. You have to use the airport driver versions that are in the Debian wiki here on Mac rumors. Every time I install the first thing I do is uninstall your driver versions because the internet is soooooo slowww…once those versions are uninstalled and the specific versions are installed the internet is normal again…just thought you might wanna know because I’ve seen you post in other threads asking wicknix how to speed up the internet…the reason for the slowness is not your internet or the browser it’s the driver versions…I attached the download links below for the correct driver versions…you have prevent those drivers from being updating from Sid’s repos as once the specific versions are install synaptic/update manager wil go off saying updates are bailable and attempt to update to the latest broken drivers. I usually issue a command to prevent them from updating but there’s multiple ways accomplishing…I don’t know how preseed works but I’m sure you probably already know haha. I really do appreciate your work….you are seriously awesome 😎
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/the-powerpc-debian-wiki.2178457/

Underfixes you’ll see the fwcutter and airport driver…I lock the the drivers synaptic to prevent the system from automatically using the latest versions from your repository and issue dpkg -i to install the specific driver versions from the debs. Hope that helps! Oh and last but not leaste do not install the legacy package…there should be two debs/drivers installed for airport..I noticed your preseed installs all three….fwcutter, b43firmware and legacyb43…you wanna remove the legacy from installing from the preseed….that needs to be removed before those airport versions are installed
I installed the older version to extract the firmware from the b43 device and indeed my wireless works much faster. I will forward port this old code into sid with a newer version name, so all the people with MintPPC installed will get this version on their machines. I will need to find a way to make
firmware-b43legacy-installer be deinstalled.
 
Ok, so I added b43-fwcutter_019-8.1+mintppc_powerpc.deb and firmware-b43-installer_019-8.1+mintppc_all.deb to the repo. I also added firmware-b43legacy-installer_019-8.1+mintppc_all.deb. I now made installation of firmware-b43-installer automatically delete firmware-b43legacy-installer and vice versa. To get this new firmware-b43-installer (which basically is 019-3), you need to do:
Code:
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade firmware-b43-installer
In case you have legacy installed, replace firmware-b43-installer by firmware-b43legacy-installer in the code line. If you have both installed, delete both of them and reinstall the one you need. I will add a section in installation instructions about this subject matter. Please test and report.
PS I have a PowerBook G4 Al and I thought it needed b43, well I was wrong. With the b43 driver as sole driver, there is no wireless. It needs b43legacy. I have only one driver installed now. The chipset is 14e4:4320. I added an Airport page on my website to find out which chipset your Airport card has and which driver you then need.
 
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I
Right I understand. You asked for people to volunteer to try an updated image if there was interest. I am interested because I have machines that are not on network. I’m an IT admin and I’ve used Linux and have been in the industry 20+ years. So yes I’m interested if you decide to move forward your side project it would be useful for me in certain situations lol. I was just responding a question you asked everyone…wasn’t sure if you were looking for someone with advanced knowledge to test images I’m offering myself as tribute lol
I have a disk image ready to test. I will add it soon to my Google drive. I will keep you updated, it's 32-bits for the moment. I am working on the 64-bits version.
It's around 6 Gb!
 
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Hi Jeroen,

Is it a complete disk image with serveral partitions?

Thanks,
Christian
Yes. I did not include MATE packages this time. It is LXDE only. If you want the MATE environment, you will have to add these packages yourself:
 
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hey @Jeroen Diederen I actually ended up compiling the lxde fixes from there development page and meant to respond a ways back to let you know it fixed my issue with the panels half missing….is there anyway though to patch on the fly during the preseed install just to save a step. Even if Debian patches it in a later release I don’t think having those packages applied during preseed/on the fly will cause any major issues and at worst the packages could be removed if Debian ends up sending out the fixes through updates in the future if not no biggie(which I don’t think they will touch for a while as lxde is not receiving much love today due to it being succeeded lxqt)….any plans to move everyone over the lxqt in the future?
 
hey @Jeroen Diederen I actually ended up compiling the lxde fixes from there development page and meant to respond a ways back to let you know it fixed my issue with the panels half missing….is there anyway though to patch on the fly during the preseed install just to save a step. Even if Debian patches it in a later release I don’t think having those packages applied during preseed/on the fly will cause any major issues and at worst the packages could be removed if Debian ends up sending out the fixes through updates in the future if not no biggie(which I don’t think they will touch for a while as lxde is not receiving much love today due to it being succeeded lxqt)….any plans to move everyone over the lxqt in the future?
For people who don’t know what this is about, see this post.
To answer your questions. It is my intention to add these newly built lxpanel packages to my repository so they will get installed automatically, also during installation with the preseed file.
I am not switching to LXQt just yet. LXDE has a smaller footprint, it uses less RAM when loaded and is therefore more suitable for us Mac users, especially at the low end. MintPPC is even used on G3.
 
I amended the mintsystem package to include apt pinning settings for lxpanel, lxpanel-data and the airport drivers. They will be installed in /etc/apt/preferences.d/99-mintppc.pref. From now on these packages will not be automatically removed by upgrading from Debian sources.
 
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