Is Ubuntu giving up on the PPC platform?

Brian Durant RoadTripDK at MyRealBox.Com
Sun Feb 12 09:15:28 UTC 2006


On 11. feb 2006, at 23.21, Eric Dunbar wrote:

> On 2/11/06, Brian Durant <RoadTripDK at myrealbox.com> wrote:
>> I have seen a number of postings about resources for PowerPC users
>> that have been pulled, there is no PPC Ubuntu list and it seems
>> almost impossible to find any PPC Ubuntu/Kubuntu users on this list.
>
> I imagine PPC Linux will continue for many years to come.
> YellowDogLinux is dedicated to PPC-only and Mac (most PPC users ;-)
> owners tend to keep their computer for decades longer than Windows/x86
> clone owners.

Actually, the rumor mill on the YDL and Fedora Core PPC lists said  
that YDL is deep sixing Apple PPC support. 4.1 is the last major  
upgrade, or at least so says some of the people in the know. YDL is  
going to concentrate on IBM Power4 computers and servers.
>> I can see that development of Dapper is continuing apace, but as long
>> as there isn't a resolution for the thermal and fan control issues
>> for G5 single towers (like mine), iMac G5 and G5 tower multi-
>> processor systems, I am starting to wonder if the PPC platform is
>> still considered viable for Ubuntu since Apple's switch to Intel? Is
>> there a serious effort being made to continue PPC development, or are
>> we orphans now?
>
>> As far as I can see, from his e-mails on debian-
>> powerpc at lists.debian.org, benh at kernel.crashing.org seems to think
>> that they have the problem more or less sussed (for my G5 tower
>> anyway), yet there doesn't seem to be a kernel update for Breezy yet
>> and Dapper still has the same problem with thermal control.
>
> I imagine there never will be an official kernel update for Breezy
> since the kernel is a pretty major thing to change (though, there
> likely will be unofficial kernel updates ;-) in a post-production
> operating system.
>
> Keep your eye on YellowDogLinux (and, I know you do ;-). They're
> likely to get the problems fixed first and then the fix will propagate
> to the other PPC Linuxes.

Actually, Fedora Core 4 PPC Pegasos version (unsupported) seems to  
have the kernel issue sussed for my machine, but there were other  
major problems with FC4 PPC Pegasos:

1) The random freezes.
2) The problem with " ata1: command 0x35 timeout, stat 0x50 host_stal  
0x4 hda lost interrupt mpic_enable_irq timeout"
3) The sound issue.

If a distro has one problem solved, there are at least three other  
problems. That is why I would like to stick with Kubuntu for the long  
haul, if possible..

Cheers,

Brian





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