3

I have an old and trusty Mac Mini G4 that is happily offering many services in my home. Sadly both Lubuntu 16.04 and Debian now dropped powerpc support.

Is there any hope to keep on using this machine and updating it? I am interested in a server distro, Debian was working perfectly for me in many years (just to give some feedback about my preferences: stable, easy, reliable).

Is there maybe any distro that allows me to download source code from internet and compile it locally almost automatically?

Pitto
  • 245
  • 1
    Not sure about G4, but Gentoo ( www.gentoo.org ) is for true hackers – schweik Feb 14 '20 at 19:38
  • Thanks for your input @schweik I am looking for something that will not need 10 years of studying to make it work :) – Pitto Feb 16 '20 at 20:36
  • 1
    Some chance you have with unofficial: http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/10.0/powerpc/iso-cd/debian-10.0-powerpc-NETINST-1.iso Comments are here : forums.macrumors.com/threads/the-powerpc-linux-wiki.2178457/ – schweik Feb 18 '20 at 08:08
  • This is amazing news @schweik and totally a possible answer! Does this solution provide new sources.list entries too? – Pitto Feb 18 '20 at 09:15
  • 1
    Sorry, even I am a PowerPC fun, at present I do not have a free G4 machine and spare time, hence you have to make the experiments by yourself. But I hope the net-install-CD does configure the new sources.list, too. There may be some bugs in the instalation, but if using the CLI instalation, you may allways jump to the next terminal (alt-F2) to see what problem came on, and look at the target directory what is installed in. If installing on a fresh Apple G4, you need to make some reconfig of the OpenFirmware, you know. – schweik Feb 18 '20 at 09:51

0 Answers0