Debian GNU/MiNT

Introduction
The Debian GNU/MiNT project aims at providing the latest versions of the most commonly used programs. Based on Debian GNU/Linux, MiNT patches from Sparemint and separate packages, the MiNT port will provide the same ease of use of package systems, and the same directory structure as Debian GNU/Linux. Installation programs running from TOS will be available later.

The Debian GNU/MiNT distribution is not (yet) a part of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, and is completely separated from the other Debian ports, so far.

News

2000-09-19
A corrected version of the mintbase.tgz file is now at place.
2000-09-18
The first test release of the base tarball for Debian GNU/MiNT has been made. It's available here, and its total compressed size is 16799254 bytes.
No installation tools are available for this first test release. Gunzip and untar into a clean partition or directory, and use the mint.cnf file placed in /usr/share/doc/debian-mint/mint.cnf in the package.
2000-09-11
The bash problem is fixed, and the previous fix in fileutils was moved to mintlib. Also dpkg and sysklogd has had some small bugfixes.
It is soon time to make a first test release of the base tarball. Its size will be approximately 16MB and it will take about 70MB on an ext2 partition. A list of which packages that are included in the tarball will also be available on the FTP site.
2000-09-06
Architecture is now called mint-m68k, and a new dpkg version understands this. When installing packages, dpkg might complain about wrong architecture type; just use option --force-architecture to force an installation. This problem will go away over time, when packages are recompiled.
2000-09-05
Base packages put into its own directory in the FTP area.
New base packages compiled with MiNTLib 0.55.3.
There are still some problems with bash, hanging when running scripts started from dpkg.
2000-06-28
News section created.

Mailing list
We have a mailing list, dedicated for generic discussions about the Debian GNU/MiNT project. To join, send a mail to listserv@nocrew.org with the text "subscribe debian-mint <your full name>" in the body of the message. If you join the list and notice that others are writing in a weird language, most likely to be Swedish, please tell us, and we'll switch to English.

Packages
We have started to compile some packages, but we cannot ensure that things will work for you. You can find all compiled packages on ftp://ftp.nocrew.org/pub/debian-mint/binary-mint-m68k/. The base packages are placed in the subdirectory base/. To install the packages, you first need to unpack the dpkg binaries, or get the Debian GNU/MiNT base tarball to get a whole base file system to start working with. There is currently no installation tool, so you need an old system. If you want to try this, I suggest that you also join the mailing list, where you can get more information, if you have problems. Later, there will be installation instructions on this page.

For the moment, there are only a few source packages available for download, but to not violate the GPL licence of the rest of the packages, we will gladly provide possibly modifications we make when porting packages to MiNT, if you mail us. The source packages available so far, can be found at ftp://ftp.nocrew.org/pub/debian-mint/source/.

Good luck.

Links
Other MiNT distributions:

Other MiNT pages: Debian links:

Last modified November 2000
Tomas Berndtsson - tomas@nocrew.org
edited by lars
23870 visitors since September 2000.