Extending PowerPC Support.

[Andrew McCall]

Hi Folks,

I was wondering what needs to be done to extend the Ubuntu's PowerPC
support?  I myself have a beige G3 thats perfectly capable of running
Debian Linux, but support for a user-orientated distribution such as
Ubuntu would be even better!

I was thinking that most of Ubuntu should work as its based on Debian,
but I don't know about the installer or of any applications are
compiled with G4 specific extensions - I presume they won't be as
Ubuntu runs on G3 iMac's.  Things that would need modifying are:

Booting Method - BootX works perfectly for this.
Kernel - Normal kernel so long as its compiled with PowerPC G3 support.
Initrd - This would probably be where most of the work needs to take
place, a custom initrd would need to be created so that BootX could
boot into this and then start the install.

Can anyone clarify how much of the PowerPC installer is tied to
specific PowerPC hardware, for instance, would the installer detect
and configure the sound card in a beige G3 or would it completely
ignore it?

Can anyone give me any guidance on how I would create a custom initrd
to try this?

-- 
Thanks,

Andrew McCall
andrew.mccall at gmail.com