Installation MintPPC 9.

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DON'T FOLLOW THE FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS! NEW INSTRUCTIONS ARE HERE. Install a base Debian Squeeze system. I opted for the minimal iso, which one can burn to a USB stick or burn to CD. I install it this way as my experience with CDROM installations are bad. Most of the time the installer hangs on my PowerBook G3 Pismo as the CDROM cannot read some package. After the installation of a Debian Squeeze system one needs to follow the instructions for MintPPC installation. Installation of MintPPC therefore consists of a Debian Squeeze base system with, on top of that, MintPPC specific packages which are installed through the mint-installer (see MintPPC installation). Contents: 1. USB base system installation 2. CDROM installation 3. Debian Squeeze base system installation 4. MintPPC installation 5. Post installation 6. Known problems 7. Oldworld Mac Installation 8. Links

1. USB base system installation

Download the official Debian Squeeze netinstaller iso here (around 240 Mb). You can also opt for the smaller businesscard iso (around 70 Mb). If prefer the business card iso as it faster to copy onto a USB stick. Both installation methods require a working internet connection, preferably a wired connection. If you don't have a working internet connection you cannot install MintPPC as the MintPPC specific packages are downloaded over the internet. If you are running a Classic MacOS partition you should read the Release Notes. In Gparted make the USB stick empty. Find also out here what the device name is for your stick (in my case /dev/sda but it could be different). Then copy the content of the iso to the stick. It's important to do this from a PowerPC based Mac as otherwise the dd process goes too fast and your PPC based Mac won't be able to boot from it:
sudo dd if=/path/to/mini.iso of=/dev/sda

To do the same in OSX, do the following. First convert the .iso file to an .img file in OSX so that it can be written to a USB stick:
hdiutil convert -format UDRW -o ~/path/to/target.img ~/path/to/mini.iso

There is a bug in the "hdiutil" command. No matter what you call the target, it will add .dmg to the end. You can either ignore that or delete the .dmg extension. To download the images which were already converted to be burnt to USB immediately: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3809776/mini.img

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3809776/debian-6.0.3-powerpc-businesscard.img http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3809776/mintppc93imgmd5sums.txt To create the bootable USB stick, you need to get the disk number which is easiest to do using Disk Utility, select your USB stick and use the "Info" button. Then 'burn it':
sudo dd if=/path/to/mini.imgcreatedabove of=/dev/rdiskN bs=1m

("N" is the number of the USB disk obtained from Disk Utility) More info on creating bootable USB drives from OSX can be found here. Then boot from the USB if your Mac is capable of doing this. One of my Pismo is, the other not, don't ask me why. They are both the same. Boot in open firmware by holding option+command+o+f. Then find out which is the device:
dev / ls

You should see somewhere usb with an extra entry disk, write that number down usb19 or something in my case. Then have a look at the devalias:
devalias

Now it's either usb0 or usb1 which is associated with usb19. This is your boot device, in my case usb1. Then boot:
boot usb1/disk@1:2,\\yaboot boot usb0/disk@1:2,\\yaboot (or)

Link for more information about device names in open firmware for USB booting Continue with Debian Squeeze base system installation.

2. CDROM installation
Burn the iso onto a CDROM (the one you downloaded in section 1) and boot from it (hold C down while booting). Continue with Debian Squeeze base system installation.

3. Debian Squeeze base system installation

Install a Debian Squeeze base system without a GUI. It's important not to install a GUI as we will be installing one of our own and we don't want to end up with a real Debian GUI. It's important to note that by default the Debian partioner formats the partitions as ext3, but ext4 significantly is faster than ext3. Although ext4 is still considered not thoroughly tested, we recommend to format your drive with ext4 unless you run MintPPC on mission critical machines. Somewhere during the installatiion process you

will be asked which predefined collections of software you want to install. Untick the graphical desktop environment (there should be no asterisk in front of the Graphical desktop environent, you can untick with the space bar). We will only install "Standard system utilities" and "Laptop", in case you are installing MintPPC on a laptop. If you feel like you need more help, you can have a look at the old instructions (which does not completely apply to this type of installation as those instructions were written for an expert installation). You can alo have a look at the official instructions from Debian.

4. MintPPC installation
wget http://mintppc.org/files/mintppc9/mint-installer chmod +x mint-installer sudo passwd

'Sudo passwd' we use to create a password for the root account. Login as root (su) with your root password:
su

hit enter and give your newly created root password. First we need to install sudo as it's not in the base install:
apt-get install sudo

Then add yourself to the sudoers list.

nano /etc/sudoers

then add your own username under root and copy it like it is:
root ALL=(ALL) ALL jeroen ALL=(ALL) ALL

CTRL-x and y to save. You can now logout of the root shell (CTRL-d). Start the installer as sudo.
sudo ./mint-installer

This will install all the required packages for Linux MintPPC using a prompt. In this way you have some control over what you install. If you just accept the default MintPPC settings (which are good of course!) you might want to do the following:
sudo ./mint-installer -y

The latter -y will take care that no questions are asked. If something freezes, during installation using the script you can always reboot and run the installer again. Just make sure that the system is 'clean', by doing:
sudo dpkg --configure -a

Make sure that everything is installed. You might break the installer with CTRL-C before the MintPPC specific programs are going to be installed. Just run the installer again from the start. It might add other programs. If nothing changes anymore, continue with installation of the MintPPC specific programs. When everything is installed, just before rebooting, you could stop the installation here to adjust the X settings, if you know of a working xorg.conf file for your type of Mac. There are a few examples here. If you don't know what to do, type "y" for reboot. After this: reboot...

5. Post installation
In the GDM login window select as Session: "Linux Mint LXDE" Then login with your username and password. I would make the Linux Mint LXDE the default for future sessions. NB If you see a distorted GUI, or no GUI at all, go to the MintPPC forum. We will try to solve your problem there. After using the new MintPPC 9.2 installer there is only one thing left to do. Just go to Preferences -> Openbox Configuration Manager and select "Mint" as theme. Now it's time to enjoy Linux MintPPC 9. After a few minutes you will see the desktop picture coming up. Now it's time to make bash look better (with colors). In a terminal:
rm -rf .bashrc

If you are installing MintPPC on a PowerBook G4 Aluminium then I would go for an extra kernel module to prevent overheating. Add therm_adt746x to /etc/modules. Make sure to also install cpudyn:
sudo apt install cpudyn

To have your wireless card working, you only need to find out which device name your wireless card has. In a terminal type:
sudo iwconfig

It will tell you which device name is the wireless device. It will have a name like wlan0 or eth1 for example. Suppose your card shows up as eth1, you know that the wireless card has device name eth1. Open up wicd (click the network manager in the panel in the bottom right of the screen, or you can find it in the Menu, under Internet). Click Preferences and add eth1 as wireless device (or any other device name you found with iwconfig). Close the preference window and Refresh the list. Then connect to your wireless network. Note that for classic airport there is only support for WPA-PSK, not WPA2.

6. Known problems
Mintinstall (Software Manager) could not be ported due to a missing library in Debian. If the library will ever be available I will port mintInstall and let you all know via the home page. If you have questions, remarks or suggestions, go here.

7. OldWorld Mac installation

If you are planning to install MintPPC 9 on an OldWorld Mac (the beige PowerMacs), read the following page carefully. It can all be done automatically now, see here.

8. Links
Click here.