Extending PowerPC Support.

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, Nov 03, 2004 at 12:40:55PM +0000, Andrew McCall wrote:
> 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.

To my knowledge, there are no useful extensions that could be used.
About the only one that comes to mind is AltiVec, and that requires
special application support and is only really useful for
mathematically-intensive tasks.

> 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.

The main issues are:

  * We need floppy support. This isn't available on any Ubuntu
    architecture right now, although it's on the list for Hoary.

  * OldWorld systems are a royal pain to boot, and the installer needs
    to have support for this; for example, if you're using BootX you
    won't want to install a bootloader at all.

> 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?

In general, the installer tries to do as much hardware detection as it
can. If you can clarify what sound card you've got, I can make sure that
it's detected.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                    [cjwatson at canonical.com]