MintPPC 11 vs. Lubuntu 13.04 Shootout Deathmatch!

Not really. I told you earlier I installed MintPPC alongside Lubuntu on my Sawtooth, and since I wrote up a review of Lubuntu I thought I'd do the same for Mint. Minus the bloodletting.

Here's what you get with MintPPC: an easy install process, a good variety of low resource applications, and an LXDE desktop all set up and ready to go. Based on Debian Wheezy and Mint 11 (Katya), it's designed specifically for PowerPC Macs and is as painless to install as any distro. This being Linux, though, there are issues. This being Linux, though, there are also workarounds. I'll get to those in a minute, but first the positives.

Minitube is back! It's been long broken on Debian and was removed from the Wheezy repositories, but it's here and working flawlessly. Also, video performance in general is excellent. VLC and Gnome Mplayer work out of the box, and Gnome Mplayer in particular plays DVDs very smoothly. G3 users will need a specially compiled Mplayer and VLC available in this thread. Otherwise they'll crash without altivec. Or you can compile your own for the fun of it;)



As you can see from the screenshot above, MintPPC comes with PCManFM which also provides icons on the desktop. It automatically recognized my OS 9 and OS X partitions, but not my Lubuntu partition. For this I'll have to edit /etc/fstab. Performance is what you'd expect from an LXDE environment--fast. Plus the GUI is very sleek and minimal, more so than MintPPC 9.

About the GUI, though, there are some (fixable) problems. First, the now infamous invisible fonts problem is still here as of this writing, where black GTK fonts are invisible after installation. This is a Debian bug that is in the process of being fixed, but in the meantime I posted the workaround here. Also, the GTK2 theme breaks on GTK3 apps causing them to revert to the "default ugly" look. I guess MintPPC was put together in that awkward transition where GTK2 themes weren't yet updated to deal with GTK3 apps, but you can install the GTK2/GTK3 theme Mint-Z Improved, which is almost identical to Mint-X Metal (the default). The only hiccup was the task bar now displays the text white, but that's fixed by right clicking on the task bar, choosing "Task Bar (Window List) Settings" and checking the "Flat buttons" box. The two screenshots below show the GTK3 apps Gedit and Totem Movie Player, first under Mint-X Metal and the second with the compatible Mint-Z Improved.





If you want me to get really negative, I'll reserve that for "Software Manager." It's apparently designed for people who find Synaptic Package Manager too complicated, but if you've already installed Linux there is no way you will find Synaptic too complicated. Nevertheless, Software Manager is dumbed down to a toddler's level and also happens to be broken beyond belief. I would've liked to have seen it not included.

There are a couple of other default installs you'd do yourself a favor in switching out. Exaile is a music player that has been a massive fail for me on every system I've tried it on. Replacing it with Audacious would be a big upgrade. Also, XArchiver appears unmaintained and has a bug preventing it from unpacking .7z files. A good replacement is File-roller, though you'll probably want to install it with the --without-recommends option or it'll install a bunch of Gnome stuff with it.

A couple of other minor quibbles. No CD ripper? Am I the only one who still rips CDs? And an SSH server was not installed by default. If you're gonna have an SSH client by default, you might as well put the server software in, too.

I should also warn you about update-apt-xapian-index. It runs just after installation and, like Spotlight running for the first time, will drastically slow down your system especially if you don't have a lot of memory. You can look in this forum thread if you need to disable it. I just let it run and it finished after ten or fifteen minutes.

And one last note, Powerprefs, the pbbuttonsd configuration tool, must be run as root to save changes.

So what are you waiting for? Go grab an install CD and give it a whirl. There's a wealth of information in the MintPPC forums, just use the search, or ask a question if you can't find the answer.

UPDATE: I should add that my install came with pulseaudio, which can cause problems if you're trying to use a JACK audio server, among other things. So you might want to uninstall pulseaudio.

Multiple Linux Distros on One Hard Drive With Yaboot

So I had this old 13 GB hard drive packed away in a box that I completely forgot about until a few days ago when I thought, "Why aren't I using this?" Then I went back to playing with my balloon.

Several hours later, though, I decided to stick it in my Sawtooth as a second hard drive and use it to test out Linux distros on two partitions. So in an act of impressive daring-do and engineering elan, I opened its door. (My sarcasm is well-earned. I'm a veteran of the 7100 wars [don't ask].) A few screws unscrewed and screwed, a quick jumper setting change, and I had a second hard drive on top of my primary one and I was ready to go. From there, I closed the door and got some install CDs out.

The decision on which two distros to install was a no-brainer. Since I already have Debian on a laptop, I'd install Lubuntu and MintPPC. But how do you instal two Linux distros on the same hard drive? Never did that before. After a bit of googling, I came to one of two conclusions: either it was so complicated that speaking of it was a lot like the first rule of fight club, or it was so easy that nobody even bothered to write up a how-to. After going through it, I can now confirm the latter conclusion was the accurate one. Or was it the former? I always get those mixed up.

Apparently when you install any distro that uses deb-installer, it will automatically recognize any other Linux distros on the drive and append your yaboot configuration accordingly. It also recognizes OS X partions, but in my experience not OS 9 ones. Those I have to manually enter into yaboot.conf. So the procedure is easy.

First I started with MintPPC. In the deb-installer I set up the bootloader, swap, and root partitions and left the space I had planned for Lubuntu as "Free Space." Then I went ahead with the install just like any other. When that was all done, I booted with the Lubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) alternate CD (graphical installers are a PITA), and in the partitioner I set the remaining free space as Lubuntu's root partition. No need to set different bootloader and swap partitions as the existing ones will be shared. Then I proceeded with the install and rebooted.

Now at the yaboot prompt you enter "l" for Linux just like always, but at the second screen you press tab to display your choice of Linux installs. In my case, "Linux" for Lubuntu and "Debian-Linux" for MintPPC. You can edit those names in yaboot.conf to something shorter. Then type which one you want to boot and it boots!

The only problem I have is sometimes my display says "out of range" when the yaboot screen is supposed to display, so I have to type blind. I'll have to investigate that, but in the meantime I'll just ignore it and hope it goes away.

So now I have MintPPC and Lubuntu to try out. I'll probably write up something more about them later, but for now they haven't destroyed my computer yet so it's all good.

UPDATE: Just don't run ybin on a boot volume where your yaboot.conf only has one Linux install listed. In my case, the yaboot.conf on my Lubuntu install was the one with both Linux volumes since it was installed second, and the deb-installer ran ybin off of that. I made the mistake of running ybin while in MintPPC and temporarily making my Lubuntu volume invisible to yaboot. I got things sorted by running the Lubuntu install CD in rescue mode and re-installing the boot loader. Lesson learned.

Linux MintPPC 11 is Out!

I just installed the new MintPPC 11 and have been playing around with it, so this is more a quick look than a comprehensive review but I like what I see.

First, the authors announce this is based on Debian Wheezy (testing) so there are likely to be some bugs. This is roughly equivalent to what Ubuntu does, basing their releases on the "testing" branch rather than "stable". The advantage is you get newer versions of software like Iceweasel 7.

I can report to you that Iceweasel 7 is fast. Like super-fast. Another very cool piece of software installed by default is Minitube, a youtube viewer for PPC users lacking flash.

The install was hassle free. The only head scratcher was when confronted with a screen asking you to choose which kernel. I chose version 3 since it was highlighted by default. I thought, "Well, I'll probably break sleep with this, but what the hell? Latest and greatest, right?" And predictably, sleep doesn't work. Other users report sleep works fine, so maybe they went with the safer 2.6 kernel.

Setting up wireless was pretty painless. Sound began muted, but I just had to untick the mute box and had sound working. The LXDE desktop was slick and its memory usage was low. Everything runs comfortably in this iBook with 256 MB of RAM. MintPPC installs by default a variety of of useful software, so everything's there pretty much set up for the average user.

One last thing, unlike the stable branch, mplayer from testing now works on G3's. The stable version was compiled it appears for G4's only. However, VLC still breaks when playing video. I got the stable version working by compiling my own, but I haven't gotten to that here yet.

So give MintPPC a shot. If you're new to it, just register for free at their website and you'll find install instructions and a responsive forum area. Good luck.

UPDATE: If you have a dual boot system, beware that the Debian installer MintPPC uses can corrupt your OS 9 drivers making your OS 9 partition unbootable. The solution is to run Drive Setup from a Mac OS 9 install CD and update drivers. I wrote about this earlier here.

Linux MintPPC the Future?

Dr. Dave pointed me out in comments to MintPPC which I used briefly and forgot to write about. Dave says it's the future of powerpc, and I'm prone to agree with him. Basically it's an out-of-the-box-everything-just-works distribution that ports the Linux Mint Debian distribution over to PPC and includes some fixes specifically for PPC hardware. These are features Debian's main distribution makes you enable manually, giving birth to some of my more verbose and prose-award worthy blog posts, specifically wireless, graphic hardware rendering, and sound.

Wireless on an original Airport card and some hardware rendering don't work out of the box in Debian because of licensing issues, and sound doesn't work apparently out of ultra caution about some bug in the past that may not even exist anymore. But instead of making you, the user, muck around forums and horribly written blogs looking for answers, MintPPC takes care of all these features for you and has them enabled by default. Much easier on the newbie.

When I was using it, I was generally impressed. It has a slick look (screenshots) and snappy performance, and the MintPPC developers have even compiled the newest versions of Iceweasel (Firefox re-branded), something unavailable to Debian PPC users. I ended up going back to regular Debian, though, because I wanted to use Openbox on top of Gnome-core for my iBook install, which you can do on MintPPC but you'd end up with a bunch of Mint-specific software you weren't using. Also I'm a masochist.

So go ahead and check out MintPPC's website. It's completely painless.