MintPPC

[mintppc]

I ask for help, see post
https://www.u58733p55594.web0093.zxcs-k ... ions-fail/

[mintppc]

@xeno74 do only 32-bits userland distributions run on your type of machines ?

[xeno74]

@xeno74 do only 32-bits userland distributions run on your type of machines ?

Yes, that's correct. PPC64 Linux distributions don't work reliable on e5500 machines.

[MartinW]

Do we know why this is? Not that I am capable of contributing towards doing anything about it. Just curious as I was surprised that a 64bit version did not work. I know that OS4 / MorphOS etc. are 32bit but I expected linux to have a working 64bit variant.

[mintppc]

‘Skateman’ and I tried to run LMDE 6 PPC64 on his Mirari board and it didn’t work.

[xeno74]

Do we know why this is? Not that I am capable of contributing towards doing anything about it. Just curious as I was surprised that a 64bit version did not work. I know that OS4 / MorphOS etc. are 32bit but I expected linux to have a working 64bit variant.

Many apps aren't compatible with the e5500 CPU. For example LightDM and libLLVM.so.7.

Some apps are compiled with AltiVec support and our e5500 CPU doesn't have AltiVec support.

Maybe a problem with a missing fpsqrt instruction: PPC64: gcc currently compiles for power4 by default, causing glibc's sqrtf to fail on e6500

[mintppc]

Tell me why those Italian guys at powerpc-laptop project, who use a similar chip (e6500 I think), run ppc64? Did they compile everything themselves to run without altivec?

https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/en/

Edit: they use Altivec e6500
http://repo.powerprogress.org/

e5500 does not have Altivec

It’s clear to me now.

[MartinW]

I just updated my packages (sudo apt-get update, sudo apt-get upgrade) and now I cannot boot linux anymore.

Any chance of recovering from this?

X5040, Mint on sda4, kernel (6.15) and DTB on the SD card.

I was going to ask if there was anything more involved in updating this setup since the kernel and linux-image don't seem to match versions but this error beat me to the question!

[xeno74]

I just updated my packages (sudo apt-get update, sudo apt-get upgrade) and now I cannot boot linux anymore.

Any chance of recovering from this?

Screenshot 2025-08-14 at 22.28.12.png

Illegal instruction from a new version of libc.

Libc send an instruction, that our e5500 CPU doesn’t understand.
Maybe the Debian developers have compiled the libc with AltiVec support or with instructions from a newer POWER CPU.

[MartinW]

Ok, thanks for narrowing it down. My Linux install is toast now anyway so I have to start again. It was on the same disk as OS4 and in my haste to try to confirm if the partition was ok I must have gone into either mos or os4 had tools and it’s screwed with the partition table. I don’t want to mess with that disk as I don’t want to risk my os4 install. Lesson learned!!

My concern is that I’m not going to be able to install a fresh copy because as soon as I update it, it’s going to break again.