Copland PPC distribution released

[Tate Johnson]

On Mon, 21 May 2007 20:25:39 +0800
Christopher Lees <christopher_lees at iprimus.com.au> wrote:

> 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/
> 

This looks like an interesting distribution, you've addressed the
needs/problems that plague the existing Ubuntu PPC. I still have my G4
iBook, and I'd be happy to give Copland a shot when I find some spare
time. In the meantime, if you're looking for someone to mirror that ISO,
I'd be more than happy to. I have a server in the US with a buckload of
bandwidth, good throughput too. Probably best to contact me off-list if
you're interested. 

Cheers,
Tate Johnson