Before the summer holidays, Adrian released a new set of Debian images to test.

I took the opportunity for new installations, starting with the Mac Mini G4, for which I wanted to write a review for a long time. So I downloaded debian-13.0.0-powerpc-NETINST-1.iso and wrote it in a USB stick with sudo dd if=/home/mathias/Téléchargements/debian-13.0.0-powerpc-NETINST-1.iso of=/dev/sdb.

Installation itself

I plugged the prepared USB stick and booted the machine maintaining these 4 keys: Win + Alt + O + F. The early boot stops and provides a prompt where we type: boot ud:,\boot\grub\powerpc.elf.

I chose the Default install, asking for the whole 60 GB disk with all in the same partition … as I don’t plan to add another system on this machine. My favorite desktop environment was is MATE but on the previous installations, it was not working correctly. So I fallbacked to LXDE that is light and not too skinny.

The installation itself went well. After the required reboot, I was able to log in and start using Linux 7.0.14.

To be prepared to send reports, I had to switch to English locale by first temporarily setting the locale to “C” or “en_US.UTF-8” with export LC_ALL=C or export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8.

Looking at dmesg for errors reported:

radeon 0000:00:10.0: firmware: failed to load radeon/R200_cp.bin (-2)
radeon 0000:00:10.0: Direct firmware load for radeon/R200_cp.bin failed with error -2
radeon_cp: Failed to load firmware "radeon/R200_cp.bin"
[drm:r100_cp_init [radeon]] *ERROR* Failed to load firmware!
radeon 0000:00:10.0: failed initializing CP (-2).
radeon 0000:00:10.0: Disabling GPU acceleration

That means that the driver for the GPU was not found. That was expected as MESA stopped the support of it in version 22.0 (earlier versions being 21.3.x), see release notes. Hopefully, r200 drivers are still available in the Amber branch.

Note that in the image released at 2025-12-06 there was an error that has disappeared: UBSAN: shift-out-of-bounds in /build/reproducible-path/linux-6.16.9/drivers/video/fbdev/core/fb_fillrect.h:100:21.

And looking at X.org log, I found:

(EE) RADEON(0): drmmode_do_crtc_dpms cannot get last vblank counter
(EE) RADEON(0): drmmode_do_crtc_dpms cannot get last vblank counter
(EE) RADEON(0): drmmode_do_crtc_dpms cannot get last vblank counter

And in another log later:

(EE) event1  - HID 04d9:048e: client bug: event processing lagging behind by 79ms, your system is too slow

About acceleration, there is nothing except [KMS] Kernel modesetting enabled.

For privileged commands, I used su - in a terminal instead of su, so that handles the paths with sbin (/usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin and /sbin) in PATH.

It is possible to add my user in sudoers file, with EDITOR=nano /sbin/visudo.

Upgrade and install packages

Some days have spent after the installation and new packages (including linux-image-7.1.3) were available the day I started the tests. The upgrade failed with a total freeze in the middle! Later, I saw that during (massive) package installation, the free memory amount is very low and reaches 8 MB! With 1 GB installed, I thought it is really too few … even with LXDE. It also failed with a swap partition extended to 2 GB. At the end … the memory stick was guilty!

After a reboot, I saw that the upgrade failed with:

Setting up linux-image-7.1.3+deb14-powerpc (7.1.3-1) ...
/etc/kernel/postinst.d/initramfs-tools:
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-7.1.3+deb14-powerpc
/etc/kernel/postinst.d/zz-update-grub:
/usr/sbin/grub-mkconfig: 274: cannot create /boot/grub/grub.cfg.new: Read-only file system
run-parts: /etc/kernel/postinst.d/zz-update-grub exited with return code 2
dpkg: error processing package linux-image-7.1.3+deb14-powerpc (--configure):
 old linux-image-7.1.3+deb14-powerpc package postinst maintainer script subprocess failed with exit status 2
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of linux-image-powerpc:
 linux-image-powerpc depends on linux-image-7.1.3+deb14-powerpc (= 7.1.3-1); however:
  Package linux-image-7.1.3+deb14-powerpc is not configured yet.

I had to make the /boot/grub partition in read-write mode following the procedure with hfsprogs.

At the end, I was able to proceed to the installation of many packages, being in root:

apt install hfsprogs strace mesa-utils fastfetch meld linux-perf gedit curl

apt install caja

apt install git gcc g++ build-essential clang subversion automake make cmake meson \
  libsdl2-dev libsdl2-image-dev libopenal-dev cppcheck cppcheck-gui

apt install netsurf-gtk abiword ffmpeg-gui vlc gimp scummvm darkplaces

They all succeeded to install. To compare with tests in March 2025, some applications failed to install at that time: vlc, libreoffice, gimp, scummvm, caja. For caja, it was due to libadwaita-1, a “Gtk widget library for mobile phones but as a build dependency of other important Gtk packages, it keeps these packages from being up to date”.

Just a note for later, after another apt upgrade that froze, I had to reboot but the system always froze! I was forced to add an option in the linux boot command in GRUB: systemd.unit=multi-user.target. Then I had to run dpkg --configure -a.

Tests per category

This is below a report per category of the tested applications.

System

After some inactivity, the session was lock and once unlocked, the colors were corrupted! The solution I found was to remove this session lock with: apt remove light-locker.

With LXDE, there is no automatic mount of a USB stick. To transfer files, I had to manually mount an USB stick (as super user) and then copy files:

mkdir /mnt/usb
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb

About system upgrades and problems with the HFS partition mounted in read-only, let’s say that the tools related to this partition format have received many improvements and their development continues.

Development

After months and several runs of apt upgrade, the system comes with gcc 16.2 and clang 21.1. I wanted to test more development tools and build few projects but there is no reason to have big surprises in this area. I noticed that I get an UBSAN trace in dmesg using a simple “perf stat” command …

OpenGL

We know that this section will be poor in successes but let’s try to investigate a bit.

$ glxinfo -B
name of display: :0.0
LLVM ERROR: Relocation type not implemented yet!
Aborted                    glxinfo -B

That is still the case with MESA 26.2.3-2.

Added the variable LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose before the command, it says that screen 0 does not appear to be DRI3 capable. And in addition to that, with the variable GALLIUM_DRIVER=softpipe, that allows to see the list of properties.

Note: With the Debian snapshot 2022-03-28, MESA version was 22.0.2 and so, this was the first version with the removed support of r200 based GPUs. There was no 3D acceleration but glxinfo returned Device: llvmpipe (LLVM 14.0.1).

To make glxgears working, it is required to use softpipe, so GALLIUM_DRIVER=softpipe vblank_mode=0 glxgears runs at 23 FPS.

Games

I tried several games like darkplaces, scummvm, SDLPoP and all refuse to start, with the message “LLVM ERROR: Relocation type not implemented yet!”. Using GALLIUM_DRIVER=softpipe allows to start but it is way too slow and have strange behaviors.

Video

I should have prepared better some videos of different formats and resolutions. But basically, I can say that mplayer and VLC work. They display correctly 640x272 videos, but not at all 720p H264 videos. After some system updates, I saw a regression with the LLVM relocation type errors.

Audio

It works playing mp3 files with the very basic LXMusic.

Internet

A word about several candidates for this touchy topic:

  • Epiphany: It is weirdly named Web in system menu … and does not work.
  • Netsurf: It works but with its own limitations.
  • Firefox: It has problems on PPC32 so there is no package for it.
  • ArcticFox: I downloaded the latest version. It works but it may be so slow that it is for example not really usable with GitHub.
  • SpiderWeb: This other challenger is not supported anymore, since 2023.

MATE

After having tested LXDE that is known (by me) to work better, it’s time to install MATE and see how it behaves. Previously, I faced some problems and even more, with the last december image, it failed to be installed. Let’s try with this new Debian image: apt install mate-desktop-environment.

I was able to switch to MATE. The desktop is slower but I did not see many differences with LXDE in term of applications, except VLC that started but choosing to open a file, it froze! After killing it, the system colors were corrupted.

Conclusion

To summarize, the installation itself works well with no broken packages anymore and the possibility to install big applications like OpenOffice but I faced some known problems with this venerable but old and limited machine. That’s not a surprise but the machine is under powered, has not enough memory, the driver for GPU acceleration is not present anymore by default. So, for Internet browsing, even with the unexpected ArcticFox, the global performance does not allow a satisfying user experience.

The 32-bit support is still appreciated anyway. At least, the system can be used for legacy stuff. But unfortunately not for a daily use. Or at least until there is a fix for the LLVM relocation type error and for the GPU acceleration.