Ubuntu MIPSel Port

[Kip Warner]

Hey list,

On the advice of some kind folks in #ubuntu-meeting, this is apparently
a good place to discuss the following.

It would be very nice if Ubuntu was available for mipsel hardware. It
is an emerging platform with powerful capabilities and a promising
future. We know that building most of the packages of a typical Ubuntu
installation is possible for mipsel, given that Ubuntu based
distributions like gNewSense do this already - albeit not as elegantly.

An incrementalist approach might be to start by at least adding a
mipsel target to the PPA build farm.

Unlike ARM, the MIPS architecture is not as patent encumbered. The
future for free hardware necessary for free software likely can be
benefited through an adoption of more MIPS hardware.

MIPS hardware is cheap and there is a plethora of free software already
available for it. The more free software available, the greater the
useful life to the end user, and thus the less electronic garbage that
will end up in landfills or dumped on the undeveloped world's doorstep.

Having a MIPSel port of Ubuntu allows millions of users a greater
freedom of choice on which hardware they'd like to use their favourite
operating system on.

I think this is a great platform, well deserving of more attention.

I've added some of my thoughts on this earlier on Launchpad, if anyone
would prefer to comment there:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/605694

Respectfully,

-- 
Kip Warner -- Software Engineer
OpenPGP encrypted/signed mail preferred
http://www.thevertigo.com
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