Roberto asked me to write a little bit about myself and my project. First I want to thank Roberto for the opportunity to speak about what I like doing, which is creating Linux distributions.

I started with Linux around 1999 with an iMac DV and Linux PPC2000 I think it was called. I moved from Yellow Dog Linux to Mandrake / Mandriva and ended up with Ubuntu and Debian. I have been using Debian ever since. Around 2008 I found out that LXDE as desktop is very suitable for old hardware. It even ran fine on my beloved Pismo. At that time I got an idea of porting the beautiful graphical layer that Linux Mint LXDE had to Debian powerpc. The idea at that time was to create a good looking, fast and stable Linux distribution wherein powerpc hardware (like airport cards) works out of the box. I think I succeeded with that then. MintPPC 8, 9 and 11 were released. At that time my first son was born and I had other things on my mind. I had no idea that it was such a success.

In 2019, as I was sick lying in bed, I found an old PowerBook. I thought, let’s try Debian on this thing, I have nothing better to do. While lying in bed I started reading and found out that people really liked MintPPC! I had no idea! So, then the idea was born to do the same trick again. During my illness I ported Linux Mint Tricia code with old Linux Mint LXDE to PPC. It is now again possible to install MintPPC in 2020. MintPPC comes in a 32-bits and a 64-bits version. Both versions are looking exactly the same. They are now based on Debian sid and code from the latest linux Mint version with an LXDE desktop. It runs pretty snappy on Apple machines, especially at the high end. My project has a website and installation instructions can be found there. It is all pretty straightforward, just like the “old MintPPC”.

Since a couple of months I began to develop interest in the powerpc-notebook project. I was very pleased to see that people are trying to get a new PowerPC powered laptop on the market. I was even more pleased to read that the project will be open source and that Linux will run on these machines. Then I read on and found out that Debian is one of the candidates. Wow, that is cool I thought! Well, then I immediately developed my idea to port Linux Mint Debian Edition 4 (LMDE4) to ppc64. LMDE4 is a very nice looking distribution, with cinnamon as desktop manager. Running this on G3,G4 would be almost impossible and maybe it would work on G5 I thought. But with an e6500 core this would make sense absolutely. In a nutshell, that is my idea. I started with Debian sid ppc64 and ported some of the Mint code. We will have to see how well this will perform on the new platform. I am in the early stages so anything is possible.

I think it will be good if there is more choice in distributions for the powerpc-laptop project. Not everyone likes the same stuff. I hope that this laptop project will be successful and that some nice distribution will be placed upon it in the future.

Best regards,

Jeroen Diederen

http://mintppc.nl

Yocto project update

In the last weeks we created a custom desktop theme for LXQT and continued giving more stability to the current version of the distribution. At the same time we are trying to add more productivity applications but we are finding several problems. One of them is caused probably by the nvidia driver when Shotcut is launched, see here for more details and contact us if you think you can help.

Yocto LXQT PowerPC Desktop

Finally, we are updating our distribution from Yocto 2.4 Rocko to Yocto 2.6 Thud. We hope to have an stable version soon and thinking about giving access to a reduced group of people to test it.

Presentations:

Linux Day: Bergamo – Italy

The local Linux user group “BGlug” kindly accepted to include a speech about our activities during the LinuxDay of this year that was hosted at the local university of Bergamo (see picture).

The building of the University of Bergamo, where we had the speech.

Among other very interesting topics (see the complete programme here), we introduced the association, who we are, the goal of the laptop project and we explain how we want to reach such an ambitious goal. You may find here the PDF with the given presentation slides.

Many students from the local vocational school on information technology, telecommunications and electrotechnical engineering attended the presentation, together with some other people interested on the “Open Hardware” approach that we adopted. Many interesting questions rise from the students, and given the young age of the guys, nobody seems to ever heard about the “Power” architecture.

The audience -mostly young students- attending the presentation.

The complete lack of knowledge about alternatives, led to a discussion that shifted towards the importance of supporting non-mainstream technologies other that x86/x64 and ARM. The “Open Hardware” approach, and the freedom to its outcome also seems to have drawn much attention, as for a student it is very clear that freely study and, why not, change an existing fully fledged project is an ideal situation.

Linux Day: Bolzano – Italy

The experience at the LinuxDay in Bolzano (Italy) was quite good.

https://www.lugbz.org/events/linux-day-2018/

There were about 50 people attending the event, organized from the local Linux User Group and hosted at the local University. We had a 25 minutes time slot, our presentation was therefore quite short but got some Q&A from the attenders. Most of the audience didn’t have a technical background being just FOSS fans.

LinuxDay 2018 Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Main question subject was the actuality of the PPC technology and its openness. The project timetable and the financial approach also rised some attention.

Linux Day: Milano – Italy

It’s the fifth time that Linux Day Milan give us the possibility to inform and update peoples about our PowerPC Notebook project, we are very grateful for the space and renewed trust they have given us in the years. These year the organizer was the UnixMIB , very active and kindly user group, the event done on 27th OCtober, during the national day of Linux in Italy, was held inside the beautiful spaces of University Bicocca. We had our exhibition space, like some others Linux User Group, where Riccardo, Luigi and myself had the opportunity to talk with attenders of the events.

Linux Day 2018 Milano University Bicocca

During the presentation in the auditorium we have updated about our project and thanks to the generous time available for our presentation (60 minutes) we have the opportunity to answer in details to many interesting questions.

Presentation at Linux Day 2018 Milano

As usual we have recorded the presentation, below.

11th GNU/Linux Valencia meeting.

Software libre, democracia y nuevos dispositivos: Valencia – Spain

The experience at the 11th GNU/Linux Valencia meeting was very good. There were only 15 people attending the event in a nice small room because this was not a yearly event but a monthly meetup. After an interesting explanation about Free Software and Democracy, we had a 20 minutes time slot to introduce our project but our presentation was interesting for the attenders and then we were answering questions for another 20-25 minutes.

Presention at 11th GNU/Linux Valencia meeting. Software libre, democracia y nuevos dispositivos: Valencia – Spain

Coming Soon Presentations

Free Software Conference

At Sfscon.it – Free Software Conference – our new presentation ” Open Hardware PowerPC Notebook disclose the motherboard design“, Bozen, South Tyrol – Italy 16th November

Revivo Scratch project

Revivo con Scratch

The project is targeted at the education and research field, through the reuse of obsolete notebooks

equipped with PowerPC (G3,G4,G5), Intel x86 (Pentium M, Celeron, Core duo) or ARM architecture.

Schools that do not have enough hardware to carry out computer projects, can reuse these notebooks, otherwise intended to be disposed of as WEEE on which they can teach children the basics of coding through SCRATCH (https://scratch.mit.edu/).

Revivo con Scratch

The experiences of the teachers involved in the project will be summarized on the wiki of the Association to be shared and repeated.

Repo.powerprogress.org update

Debian ppc64

Maintenance of DEBIAN packages for ppc64 architecture continues. We are working on optimizing the experience of using FireFox 52.9.0, merging the work already done on the TenFourFox project. Other essential packages are maintained by our collaborators and are regularly added to our repository. Suggest some packages that you would like to see in our repository, and provide the results of your tests.