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MintPPC project

Hello, I have "modded" debian 8.11 on iMac g3 with Debian sid(see this thread)/MintPPC repository to make work "sealion browser" and other things(like MintPPC lxde etc...) here a screen.
obviously there is no hardware acceleration.
 

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Tankerthebuberz said:
Eeeee I dunno I used xfce before and it was dirt slow have you played with it on your 12 inch PowerBook? I would be open to lxqt though for lower end. But I’d also be willing to try it…it can’t hurt to try!
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Hi,

Just to let you know. I have Mint XFCE running on my PowerBook G4 with sysvinit and it runs just as smooth as LXDE. The advantage is that it looks a whole lot better. I will stick with this.
 
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Jeroen Diederen said:
Hi all,

Let me introduce myself first. My name is Jeroen Diederen and I am the developer of MintPPC, which was quite a known project back in 2011. The idea of it was to have a solid Debian system, together with a lightweight desktop environment (LXDE) and a slick graphical layer on top of that. Another thing that I found important is that it is easily installable and that it takes away the pain of having to search on the world wide web for answers how to get your wireless Airport card to work for example. These are things that should work out of the box. I think I achieved that back in the days.

We are now eight years further and unfortunately, there is not much support for Linux on PowerPC anymore. Debian ditched PPC out of their release cycles and we are now left with Debian-ports. Recently I found an old PowerBook G4 in a drawer somewhere in my house. I was sick at the time and I had nothing better to do, so I decided to try Debian sid. That worked fine and then I thought about my old days. I started looking on the net about MintPPC and to my surprise, as I really didn't know that, people enjoyed MintPPC!. I stopped working on MintPPC after my first son was born and never looked back. I had no idea that for some folks it was, as I read somewhere, a stroke of genius. I was flattered and thought that I might be able to achieve the same thing once more.

This is how this project got started. We are now a month further since the inception and things are starting to work out. I have a desktop environment, based on LXDE and recent Linux Mint 19. I now also have my own installer, based on Debian-netinstaller.

For those who are interested in this project: you can follow me here in this thread or at my own website http://mintppc.nl. I don't own mintppc.org anymore, it was bought by Amazon for ad revenue. I hope to get it back in the future.
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I have recently tried to do the “automatic install” as described by your website on a G4 quicksilver with an Nvidia geforce4 MX (N17) via Ethernet. As with the manual install it fails at “select and install software“.

I’ve looked at just about every Debian reference site and instructions and have yet to find a reason why this is happening And how to get by it. I know the above post is over 5 years old but hopefully you are still involved in this project.

Any feed back would be appreciated.
 
MacMaverick855 said:
I have recently tried to do the “automatic install” as described by your website on a G4 quicksilver with an Nvidia geforce4 MX (N17) via Ethernet. As with the manual install it fails at “select and install software“.

I’ve looked at just about every Debian reference site and instructions and have yet to find a reason why this is happening And how to get by it. I know the above post is over 5 years old but hopefully you are still involved in this project.

Any feed back would be appreciated.
Click to expand...
I was confused at why it was failing when I tried too, but if you look at the top of the site, it says “Installation of MintPPC32 and MintPPC64 will FAIL.”

I wonder why. It would be great to get this to work.
 
PowerPCFan said:
I was confused at why it was failing when I tried too, but if you look at the top of the site, it says “Installation of MintPPC32 and MintPPC64 will FAIL.”

I wonder why. It would be great to get this to work.
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I found the red banner stating failure odd as well. I ignored it because throughout this thread there were so many tales of success. I too am trying to load this MintPPC OS on a G4 and a cheese grater G5 dual core. These are the last two Newworld Macs that don’t have linux running on them. I have an MDD running both Ubuntu AND Lubuntu 16.04 but the quicksilver and G5 refuse to accept any linux distros. I would love to get a powerful linux distro running on these machines. I hope @Jeroen Diederen is still working on this.

Every attempt (3X on the G4) has resulted in the same error “select and install software failure“ before it gets to the grub boot loader installation. (Or maybe during?) I’ll have to think on that some more.
 
I’m going to try something: I found an article by someone named midnightcheese stating that the latest distro of Debian 12 works on G4s and G5s. I hadn’t got the 32 bit to work but I did get it to install using the manual method. It only presented me with a CLI interface so I figured it had to do with the Nvidia GeForce4 MX GPU. What I think I’ll do is use the newer Debian distro AND the MintPPC preseed from @Jeroen Diederen in automatic to see if it will install. IF the grub install is the cause for the failure on the older distro then the later Debian distro that DID install Grub may work. I’ll let you know.

BTW, the quicksilver boots from a usb, the G5 doesn’t.
 
Before I proceed with trying to install Debian 12 with the MintPPC preseed on my Quicksilver with an Nvidia Card, I wanted to show my dual core, cheese grater G5 running Debian12-MintPPC! What? You don’t see anything on the Apple Cinema Display? That’s because the only way (so far) I can get Debian/MintPPC to run is to have a DVI monitor plugged into the Radeon ATI9600XT GPU card with the Apple Display unplugged. I will do a deep dive to see if it will be possible to run the ACD and the DVI monitor together. I have not gone any further than @Jeroen Diederen instructions where it says “boot into your MintPPC”.

I did not have to modify the boot parameters when I started up and GRUB loaded and operated fine. The only thing it isn’t doing is showing I have Mac OSX Leopard and Tiger running on the other 250GB drive. Debian occupies the other 250GB drive at this time. I’ll let you know how the Quicksilver install goes.

I forgot to mention, on initial startup the grub menu DID appear on the Apple Cinema Display, it wasn’t until I selected Debian and it started through it’s process that I lost the screen on the ACD and the DVI monitor had a message saying “Cannot Display Video”. It was then I unplugged the ACD and restarted with the DVI only and got what you see below.
 

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OK, I decided to try a different approach to installing MintPPC32 on my G4 Quicksilver. This time I’m using the approach @Jeroen Diederen provided. Using two usb sticks, “dding” and unzipping a mintppc32.img.gz onto an 8GB usb and copying the same image to another usb stick where, supposedly from the live mint environment on the 8GB stick I will then DD the mintppc32.img.gz onto the hard drive of the G4. Problem is, after following all of his instructions creating the live stick, the G4 would not boot. I have successfully booted several different Live Linux distros from the usb port on this machine in the past by just holding down the option key and clicking on the linux drive icon. This version of MintPPC32 does not appear in the parade of disks. So, I tried open firmware, using @Jeroen Diederen instructions: No joy.

So I thought I’d look at the files on the live USB to see if maybe I could direct open firmware to look somewhere else for the grub boot folder. Long story short, the grub folder (under the boot folder) is empty. There is nothing in it.

The open firmware error message I get when trying to boot the usb is:

USB-MS-CLASS can’t find DISK_LABEL unable to open usb1/disk1:2,\grub

When I look at the disk in DISKS from a linux machine it only shows one partition. So I’m not sure telling open firmware to look in partition 2 makes sense. And even if it did find the grub folder it’s empty so I’m not sure what to think.

If I can find a live cd/dvd I’ve used in the past, I may try to dd the image to the hard drive from that environment and see if that works.

Helpful hints welcomed!
MacMav
 
I’ve successfully loaded Debian 12 on my G5, dual Core cheese grater using a Radeon 9600XT GPU. I have an Apple Cinema Display and a DVI monitor hooked up to it. If I start up with just the DVI monitor everything is fine. Trying dual monitor or just the Apple Display, results in a black screen.

I’ve attempted to use the ATI info on the Debian wiki but while following the steps I get a message stating that the “firmware-AMD-graphics” can’t be found, no candidate in the repositories, and that other software references it.

Is there a repo I need to add (other than those stated in the wiki) or another way to get the “firmware-AMD-graphics”? I want to be able to drive both monitors in Debian.

A side note: IF I start up with the DVI monitor, log in to the desktop, then plug in the Apple Display, the Display Manager ”sees” both monitors hooked up. It even correctly identifies both monitors. The DVI maintains a desktop but the apple display stays black. The mouse cursor will track to where the apple display is, but it disappears from view, IOW, the desktop is extended, you just can’t see it.
 
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Hello, I have had some time during the hurricane to mess around with trying to get my g4 iMac running something usable. I have tried to install mint ppc using the net install disk on my 700mhz PPC G4 geforce2 MX without success. I read the banner at the top of the page saying the "installation will fail." I understood this to mean that the USB install method would be best but the ppc32 and ppc64 google drive files are not present (dead links). Am I to understand that this project is dead? I was really hoping to get this gorgeous old iMac to work with something usable besides OSX 10.4-10.5.

Can anyone shed any light on the state of this project?

Thanks
 
MacMaverick855 said:
I’ve successfully loaded Debian 12 on my G5, dual Core cheese grater using a Radeon 9600XT GPU. I have an Apple Cinema Display and a DVI monitor hooked up to it. If I start up with just the DVI monitor everything is fine. Trying dual monitor or just the Apple Display, results in a black screen.

I’ve attempted to use the ATI info on the Debian wiki but while following the steps I get a message stating that the “firmware-AMD-graphics” can’t be found, no candidate in the repositories, and that other software references it.

Is there a repo I need to add (other than those stated in the wiki) or another way to get the “firmware-AMD-graphics”? I want to be able to drive both monitors in Debian.

A side note: IF I start up with the DVI monitor, log in to the desktop, then plug in the Apple Display, the Display Manager ”sees” both monitors hooked up. It even correctly identifies both monitors. The DVI maintains a desktop but the apple display stays black. The mouse cursor will track to where the apple display is, but it disappears from view, IOW, the desktop is extended, you just can’t see it.
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for the ATI card to work you most probably need firmware-amd-graphics and firmware-linux-nonfree
To get to these packages one needs to add the mintppc repo to your sources list and install the packages.
Everything is documented, one only needs to read and study...

I updated the manual installation instructions. One user (Thomas Carlson) reported it to work a few days ago with the Debian image of 1.4.2025.

As a side note, automated installations don't work yet.
 
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Maybe libglamor is the problem.

Please prevent the libglamor module from loading.

mv /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libglamoregl.so /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libglamoregl.so.bak
 
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Thanks for your reply. I can try that later. I now tried to install plain Debian LXDE. See if that boots into a desktop.

I get the same problem in plain Debian it seems as MintPPC. For the moment I only fixed MintPPC32 (G4).
 
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Jeroen Diederen said:
Just for your information, I am trying to fix automated installation of MintPPC. It will take some time though. Last time I made it work was 1,5 year ago. Many things have changed since then. At least we have a recent working Debian installer image now.
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Thank you! It does the formatting of the disk also i hope ("Asking for a friend"). Thats the only thing Adelie doesn't seem to want to fix, ever
 
PC mcLinMorph said:
Thank you! It does the formatting of the disk also i hope ("Asking for a friend"). Thats the only thing Adelie doesn't seem to want to fix, ever
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Partitioning goes automatically, just use option ‘use whole disk’. You can also do guided manual partitioning if you for example want to keep MacOS.
 
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