Copland PPC distribution released

[Christopher Lees]

Sorry, I was rather tight-lipped about Copland, wasn't I?

Anyway, here's the story. Although Ubuntu runs on PowerPC machines, it
never really felt like it was designed for them, or for the kind of
people who might be running Linux on a Mac.

After official support was dropped last year for the PPC architecture, I
decided to create a spin-off distribution, which would release only for
PPC and be targetted directly at those machines and their users. In
particular, I wanted the long-standing bugs from Ubuntu PPC to be fixed
(iMac blank screens in particular - it's a showstopper that nobody else
has bothered to fix).

So here it is. Copland PPC is even more lightweight than Xubuntu (it
also uses XFCE), has a Classic Mac-like appearance, fixes a couple of
PowerPC-related gotchas, and provides custom-written utilities to aid
the switching Mac user. These utilities are HFS Browser, which allows
the user to graphically access their existing Mac partitions and
CD-ROMs; and Aiff Interchange, which converts Apple's Audio Interchange
File Format files to WAV or FLAC.

Much much more is planned, including frontends to configure Mac-on-Linux
virtual machines, user-mode x86 emulation with Qemu (for Flash, Skype
and w32), and an easy source installer format.

For more information, you can check out my blog:
http://bigbolshevik.blogs.friendster.com/a_man_and_his_penguin/

Or the official project site:
http://bigbolshevik.blogs.friendster.com/a_man_and_his_penguin/