This Is Apfelhammer!

Compiling Classic Thunderbird Client Epyrus for PPC64 [UPDATE]

November 08, 2025 — Jan Montag

Long time ago I found out that someone started a project for Classic Thunderbird, because they were not really happy about the newly established way it goes from then.

Epyrus was first conceived of sometime around March or April of 2022, after they started to feel another UXP-based e-mail client was needed, but found that there were complications that would prevent the revival of Fossamail. The original codename was actually Mercurius Civicus very briefly, before they came up with the codename Hermopolis and finally settled on Epyrus as the browser's final name.

TMUX on my Powermac G5 Arch Linux

IceDove-UXP was out there and seemingly had good bones, but too much that I found useful had been stripped out due to FOSS principles, it was really only maintained for a specific Linux distro, it had a different setup than what I was used to working on Pale Moon, and wasn't really tested on other platforms at all.

Most other UXP-based e-mail clients are loosely based on some kind of historical precedent. Mine is intended to be based on an alternate history that isn't too hard to imagine. Imagine that instead of Thunderbird being spun off and dealt with by the SeaMonkey team and the people who develop the suite, it had been developed as a first-class application alongside pre-Australis Firefox and given a similar "Phoenix" treatement. Also, imagine that the AppMenu had been implemented as planned in Thunderbird at one point, rather than being skipped in favor of the hamburger menu.

I thought I will give it a try and see if it compiles under good old Powermac G5 ARCH Power Linux and now, as I write this article, it compiles since 273 Min. straight. So I am very courius if it will work or if it break up at the end.

iTerm 2 SSH Connection to my Powermac G5

What do you guys think, will it compile or will it break? Write it in the comments please. By the way if it will compile I will write a How To so you guys can follow if one want. We compile 5 hours straight. :-)

[UPDATE] Short Update

The compiling process ended successfully after 323 Minutes, 5.4 hours on real hardware, on Powermac G5.

But Epyrus will not start. mach run and mach package (to build the software package), both commands fail. I don't know why.

Tags: archlinux, arch, powermacg5, ppc64, thunderbird, email, thunderbird, epyrus, seamonkey

Long time not seen...

November 06, 2025 — Jan Montag

Dear friends of PowerPC Linux, Unix and especially the Powermac G5, I've not written since quite a time. The reason was my other Webproject [¹] which I managed to melt with another Website and beside that, move it into a Docker Container and run it and adopt everything and so on and on and on... you know - from stick to wood like someone says. :-)

But what I want to say is that I am using Arch POWER ppc64 Linux now for quite some time every day and while I am listening to Navidrome streamed MP3 [²] in my TerminalDrome Client or do some Webstuff with Firefox or sending Mails via Calws-Mail, I am absolutely happy and it never crashed or something like that. It works so well.

So when you want to use a Powermac G5 these days, I recommend Arch Linux as the best distro outside whith the fewest hazzle to get things working.

How to install Xfce Desktop on ArchLinux ArchPOWER ppc64

October 25, 2025 — Jan Montag

As I wrote yesterday, the new ArchPOWER Linux for PowerPC 64 works like charme and with big thanks to (Kernel/Linux)-Hacker René Rebe, Firefox is working on POWER-Architecture (and much more) again after years. So you can use a modern Browser if you want.

But in the last post, I only described how you get your base system up and running while booting from usb pen drive. But you want more :-) A GUI I bet. So if you have a running instance, or when you are still in the live environment of the booted usb pen drive, you can chroot into the freshly installed ARCH Linux and can perfom different tasks. E.g. install a GUI. While the Powermac is not the fastest machine in 2025 anymore and a lot of packages are not available for ppc64, XFCe is a good idea for a good looking and modern desktop environment. My mac has the stock nVidia Geforce 6600GS graphicsboard so we need the driver for this to have 2d-acceleration. This is important, otherwise the gui is not useful because it is too slow.

Speed of light - NVMe SSD in a Powermac G5

October 24, 2025 — Jan Montag

I told you the other day that my PowermacG5 owns an NVMe-SSD-Adapter as a PCI-Express Card with a 1 TB NVME-SSD. That runs great, here is the Benchmark:

[arch@ARCHLINUX ~]$ sudo pacman -S hdparm
Abhängigkeiten werden aufgelöst …
Nach in Konflikt stehenden Paketen wird gesucht …

Pakete (1) hdparm-9.65-2

Gesamtgröße des Downloads:             0,10 MiB
Gesamtgröße der installierten Pakete:  0,24 MiB

:: Installation fortsetzen? [J/n]
:: Pakete werden empfangen …
hdparm-9.65-2-po...   101,0 KiB   394 KiB/s 00:00 [######################] 100%
(1/1) Schlüssel im Schlüsselbund werden geprüft    [######################] 100%
(1/1) Paket-Integrität wird überprüft              [######################] 100%
(1/1) Paket-Dateien werden geladen                 [######################] 100%
(1/1) Auf Dateikonflikte wird geprüft              [######################] 100%
(1/1) Verfügbarer Festplattenspeicher wird erm...  [######################] 100%
:: Paketänderungen werden verarbeitet …
(1/1) Installiert wird hdparm                      [######################] 100%
:: Post-transaction-Hooks werden gestartet …
(1/1) Arming ConditionNeedsUpdate...

[arch@ARCHLINUX ~]$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/nvme0n1

/dev/nvme0n1:
Timing cached reads:   2258 MB in  2.00 seconds = 1129.63 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 1384 MB in  3.00 seconds = 461.12 MB/sec

Yes, 1129 MB/Sec, bäm!, this is what PCIE 1.0 4.0 Slot can do. :-) Nicenstein, in a 2005 Computer.

Tags: nvme, ssd, powermac, linux

ArchPOWER Linux for PPC64(/32)

October 24, 2025 — Jan Montag

My bigfat Powermac G5 Workstation running ArchPOWER 64 while compiling Claws-Mail under XCFE and running TerminalDrome

Because of a friendly comment by Powerlinux user Matias, I am willing to try out ArchPOWER Linux for PPC (Link) again. ArchPOWER is an unofficial Port of ARCH Linux for the PowerPC Architecture: It supports: powerpc64le (>=POWER8), powerpc (>=604), powerpc64 (>=POWER4+/G5 & PS3) and espresso (WiiU SMP).

Matias wrote that Firefox is also able to run on Powermac like on T2/Linux, thanks to René Rebes Patches. I bet Firefox actually is able to run on a lot of PPC Distros outside - I am happy about that. Thank you man.

T2/Linux compiling errors

October 18, 2025 — Jan Montag

Hello and good morning, I'm back at my Powermac G5, playing around a bit with T2/Linux (all articles).

I recently reported that a current version of Firefox is capable of running on PPC64, making this distro the only one that allows this. Everyone else is having major problems with Firefox right now. Although I assume René, the maintainer of T2, is sending his patches upstream. He does a lot for the community.

Anyway, I'd like to install mousepad, an editor for Xfce4. Unfortunately, I can't compile it. I'm getting an error with the gtksourceview4 package, which is required to build mousepad. And I can't fix it.

[…]
[83/251] Compiling C object tests/test-completion.p/test-completion.c.o
[84/251] Generating symbol file gtksourceview/libgtksourceview-4.so.0.0.0.p/libgtksourceview-4.so.0.0.0.symbols
[85/251] Generating gtksourceview/GtkSource-4.gir with a custom command (wrapped by meson to set env)
FAILED: [code=1] gtksourceview/GtkSource-4.gir
env PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/src/t2-src/src.gtksourceview4.251018.101622.11937/gtksourceview-4.8.4/objs/meson-uninstalled:/lib64/pkgconfig:/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/share/pkgconfig:/usr/lib64/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/X11/share/pkgconfig:/usr/X11R7/share/pkgconfig:/usr/X11/lib64/pkgconfig:/usr/X11R7/lib64/pkgconfig:/usr/X11/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/X11R7/lib/pkgconfig:/opt/gnome/share/pkgconfig:/opt/gnome/lib64/pkgconfig:/opt/xfce4/lib64/pkgconfig PKG_CONFIG=/usr/bin/pkg-config CC=gcc CFLAGS= /opt/gnome/bin/g-ir-scanner --quiet --no-libtool --namespace=GtkSource --nsversion=4 --warn-all --output gtksourceview/GtkSource-4.gir --c-include=gtksourceview/gtksource.h --warn-all -I/usr/src/t2-src/src.gtksourceview4.251018.101622.11937/gtksourceview-4.8.4/gtksourceview -I/usr/src/t2-src/src.gtksourceview4.251018.101622.11937/gtksourceview-4.8.4/objs/gtksourceview -I/usr/src/t2-src/src.gtksourceview4.251018.101622.11937/gtksourceview-4.8.4/. -I/usr/src/t2-src/src.gtksourceview4.251018.101622.11937/gtksourceview-4.8.4/objs/. --filelist=/usr/src/t2-src/src.gtksourceview4.251018.101622.11937/gtksourceview-4.8.4/objs/gtksourceview/libgtksourceview-4.so.0.0.0.p/GtkSource_4_gir_filelist -L/usr/src/t2-src/src.gtksourceview4.251018.101622.11937/gtksourceview-4.8.4/objs/gtksourceview -L/opt/gnome/lib64 --extra-library=gtksourceview-4 --include=Gdk-3.0 --include=Gtk-3.0 --symbol-prefix=gtk_source --identifier-prefix=GtkSource --pkg-export=gtksourceview-4 --cflags-begin -DG_DISABLE_DEPRECATED -DGDK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED -DGTK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED -DGDK_PIXBUF_DISABLE_DEPRECATED -DGDK_VERSION_MIN_REQUIRED=GDK_VERSION_3_24 -DGDK_VERSION_MAX_ALLOWED=GDK_VERSION_3_24 -DGLIB_VERSION_MIN_REQUIRED=GLIB_VERSION_2_48 -DGLIB_VERSION_MAX_ALLOWED=GLIB_VERSION_2_48 -I/usr/src/t2-src/src.gtksourceview4.251018.101622.11937/gtksourceview-4.8.4/. -I/usr/src/t2-src/src.gtksourceview4.251018.101622.11937/gtksourceview-4.8.4/objs/. -I/usr/include/fribidi -I/opt/gnome/include/glib-2.0 -I/opt/gnome/lib64/glib-2.0/include -I/opt/gnome/include -I/usr/include/libmount -I/usr/include/blkid -I/usr/include/dbus-1.0 -I/usr/lib64/dbus-1.0/include -I/usr/include/harfbuzz -I/usr/include/cairo -I/usr/include/freetype2 -I/usr/include/libpng16 -I/usr/X11R7/include -I/usr/X11R7/include/pixman-1 -I/opt/gnome/include/gtk-3.0 -I/opt/gnome/include/at-spi2-atk/2.0 -I/opt/gnome/include/at-spi-2.0 -I/opt/gnome/include/gio-unix-2.0 -I/opt/gnome/include/pango-1.0 -I/opt/gnome/include/atk-1.0 -I/opt/gnome/include/gdk-pixbuf-2.0 -I/usr/include/libxml2 -I/opt/gnome/include/gobject-introspection-1.0 --cflags-end --add-include-path=/opt/gnome/share/gir-1.0 -L/usr/src/t2-src/src.gtksourceview4.251018.101622.11937/gtksourceview-4.8.4/objs/gtksourceview --library gtksourceview-4 -L/opt/gnome/lib64 --extra-library=m --extra-library=fribidi -L/opt/gnome/lib64 --extra-library=glib-2.0 --extra-library=gobject-2.0 --extra-library=gio-2.0 --extra-library=gtk-3 --extra-library=gdk-3 --extra-library=pangocairo-1.0 --extra-library=pango-1.0 --extra-library=harfbuzz --extra-library=atk-1.0 --extra-library=cairo-gobject --extra-library=cairo --extra-library=gdk_pixbuf-2.0 --extra-library=xml2 --extra-library=girepository-1.0 --sources-top-dirs /usr/src/t2-src/src.gtksourceview4.251018.101622.11937/gtksourceview-4.8.4/ --sources-top-dirs /usr/src/t2-src/src.gtksourceview4.251018.101622.11937/gtksourceview-4.8.4/objs/
Couldn't find include 'Gdk-3.0.gir' (search path: '['/opt/gnome/share/gir-1.0', '/root/.local/share/gir-1.0', '/usr/share/gir-1.0', '/opt/gnome/share/gir-1.0', '/opt/java/share/gir-1.0', '/opt/libreoffice/share/gir-1.0', '/opt/mozilla/share/gir-1.0', '/opt/openldap/share/gir-1.0', '/opt/rust/share/gir-1.0', '/opt/wasi/share/gir-1.0', '/opt/xfce4/share/gir-1.0', '/opt/gnome/share/gir-1.0', '/opt/gnome/share/gir-1.0', '/usr/share/gir-1.0']')

[86/251] Compiling C object tests/test-int2str.p/test-int2str.c.o
ninja: build stopped: subcommand failed.
Due to previous errors, no 9-gtksourceview4.log file!
(Try enabling xtrace in the config to track an error inside the build system.)
--- BUILD ERROR ---
Creating file list and doing final adaptions ...
Searching for orphaned files ...
Found 6 files for this package.
Found 1 orphaned files for this package.
Calculating package dependencies ...
Deleting dependencies, pattern:  -e ".*: t2-src$" -e ".*: glibc$" -e ".*: gcc$" ...
Adding dependencies, glib
Marking optional dependencies, glib
Creating md5sum files ...
Creating package description ...
Making post-install adaptions.

If I look at it more closely, it means something like that the error encounters during the GtkSourceView4 build on T2 Linux is due to a missing GObject Introspection (.gir) file, which is a common issue when build dependencies aren't fully met.

Rene is writing on his website, that if you plan to compile or cross compile, you need to reinstall some packages and I reinstalled t2 install -f gobject-introspection and it worked. So I have no glued what to do here. I always stuck with those failures I can't handle by myself and the Powermac G5 is a slow machine, I do it on bare metal becouse crosscompiling for ppc64 on my mac mini m4 is even more pointless.

There are other packages wich also not build, e.g. appstream-glib:

[64/114] Compiling C object client/appstream-compose.p/as-compose.c.o
[65/114] Linking target libappstream-glib/as-self-test
[66/114] Generating libappstream-glib/AppStreamGlib-1.0.typelib with a custom command
[67/114] Generating data/appstream-util-man with a custom command
FAILED: [code=4] data/appstream-util.1
/usr/bin/xsltproc --nonet --stringparam man.output.quietly 1 --stringparam 
funcsynopsis.style ansi --stringparam man.th.extra1.suppress 1 --stringparam 
man.authors.section.enabled 0 --stringparam man.copyright.section.enabled 0 
-o data/appstream-util.1 http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl
/current/manpages/docbook.xsl ../data/appstream-util.xml
I/O error : failed to load "http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/
xsl/current/manpages/docbook.xsl": Attempt to load network entity
warning: failed to load external entity "http://docbook.sourceforge.net
/release/xsl/current/manpages/docbook.xsl"
cannot parse http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/manpages/docbook.xsl
[68/114] Compiling C object client/appstream-util.p/as-util.c.o
In file included from ../client/as-util.c:21:
In function 'as_util_mirror_screenshots_app_url',
    inlined from 'as_util_mirror_screenshots_app' at ../client/as-util.c:3520:8,
    inlined from 'as_util_mirror_screenshots' at ../client/as-util.c:3636:8:
../client/as-util.c:3450:23: warning: call to '_curl_easy_setopt_err_long' declared with attribute warning: curl_easy_setopt expects a long argument [-Wattribute-warning]
3450 |                 (void)curl_easy_setopt(priv->curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
    |                       ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ninja: build stopped: subcommand failed.
Due to previous errors, no 9-appstream-glib.log file!
(Try enabling xtrace in the config to track an error inside the build system.)
--- BUILD ERROR ---
Creating file list and doing final adaptions ...
Searching for orphaned files ...
Found 6 files for this package.
Found 1 orphaned files for this package.
Calculating package dependencies ...
Deleting dependencies, pattern:  -e ".*: t2-src$" -e ".*: glibc$" -e ".*: gcc$" ...

webmention

Tags: t2linux, compiling, crosscompiling

Update on Apfelhammer.de - Bashblog with webmention and isso comments

October 12, 2025 — Jan Montag

So, this post is an update to my "weblog engine" Bashblog. This is a Shellscript wich renders my weblog in static html files, like all the other static website generators like Jekyll or Pelikan or you name it do. But there is a difference: for bb.sh you only need the standard linux tools like awk, sed etc. pp., and this works with a nice css file out of the box really good.

My Weblog apfelhammer.de with Webmention and ISSO comments

T2 Linux is fucking amazing

October 10, 2025 — Jan Montag

So yesterday I found out that with the PPC64 Version Firefox is working and this is a dealbreaker, a gamechanger. Because of a modern Browser, you can use this old computer nearly productive. I can webmail (even Googlemail), I can spotify, I can Youtube. I can do a lot of modern things only because the browser is working.

My Powermac G5 Desktop with XFCE 4 and some Terminal Windows.

On the other side I configure the system to my need. I installed my TerminalDrome Navidrome Client, I compile a lot of software and try to figure things out. I am looking for a lightwight Texteditor like Mousepad, but I can't get it to work.

Meanwhile I try to crosscompile on my MacMini M4 for PPC64 but this also doesn't work like expected. A lot of high hangig fruits.

So long, Jan

Tags: t2linux, ppc64, firefox

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