I installed MintPPC 11 on PowerBook G3 Lombard with 192M RAM. Afterwards everything went well, an hour or so, until somebody (package system) decided to start a "quiet background" process: update-apt-xapian-index. Disk swapping began, and everything else stopped...

I tested this on another MintPPC 11 installation, PowerMac G3 B&W with 512M RAM, and it took half an hour, used all available memory, but didn't make the machine unusable, so my conclusion is that this is the minimum RAM for MinPPC 11, unless update-apt-xapian-index is disabled. This can be done, simply by making the script non-executable, by issuing:

sudo chmod -x /usr/sbin/update-apt-xapian-index

I don't really know what kind of consequences not updating apt-xapian-index can have. Probably nothing serious.

Risto

Thanks for this update Risto!

I also don't think that this package is vital:
http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/apt-xapian-index

Basically, while not exactly the same, this is similar to spotlight indexing. Anyone who has ever used 10.4 or higher on a low end PPC knows how spotlight indexing kills the machine. Disabling this and disabling spotlight indexing will have similar effects.

Thanks for this. After install on my G5, this process was pegging processor for half an hour. Good to know we can kill it.

To disable this in any *buntu, you will need to issue:

as well.