Upgrade an old Debian system installed on an iBook G4

[Gugus]

Hi there,

I just opened my iBook G4, starting directly under the Debian which was
already installed some years ago. Almost everything works fine, except
I can barely install/upgrade anything. It appears that most of my
sources do not exist anymore ;-(

Are there still some powerpc repositories for Debian GNU/Linux,
available somewhere ?


Any help will be gladly appreciated.

[Anton Ertl]

Post by Gugus
Hi there,
I just opened my iBook G4, starting directly under the Debian which was
already installed some years ago. Almost everything works fine, except
I can barely install/upgrade anything. It appears that most of my
sources do not exist anymore ;-(

Your distribution is probably so old that it is no longer supported.
But such old distributions are still available through the Debian
archives <https://www.debian.org/distrib/archive.en.html>.

Post by Gugus
Are there still some powerpc repositories for Debian GNU/Linux,
available somewhere ?

According to <https://www.debian.org/ports/powerpc/>:

|The last supported release for 32-bit PowerPC is Debian 8 ("jessie").

Jessie is the current oldoldstable release. As far as I can see,
older releases are available through the archives.

- anton

[Hugues]

Hi again,

Post by Anton Ertl

Post by Gugus
Hi there,
I just opened my iBook G4, starting directly under the Debian which was
already installed some years ago. Almost everything works fine, except
I can barely install/upgrade anything. It appears that most of my
sources do not exist anymore ;-(

Your distribution is probably so old that it is no longer supported.
But such old distributions are still available through the Debian
archives <https://www.debian.org/distrib/archive.en.html>.

Aww, thanks !
I should have thought about these, but I couldn't find any evident
pointer on it through the Debian/PowerPC documentation pages.

I saw that jessie was the last supported Debian release for powerpc, but
this architecture was not available anymore on the main server (as
Jessie is still available outside the archives repositories).

At first, I struggled because of the jessie-backports, which seems
completely unusable right now (gpg key is missing on the debian keyring,
Releases is out-of-date, making the repository unusable, etc..).
But using only the single "jessie" seems to do the job.


Thanks a lot !!

I think I'll still use jessie for some time, but I should think of
switching to another distribution, less dependant on binaries (such as
gentoo, for example..)