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SuSE For PPC
Maktoo writes: "According to MacCentral, the June 2000 issue of MacTech magazine will include a CD containing a 'SuSE for PowerMac' Linux distribution. The full distribution will be available from SuSE at that time as well. It's nice to see SuSE coming to the PPC market!" It'd also be nice to see some less expensive PPC systems.
See The OpenPPC Project to get in touch with the community. The mailing list is essential for those interested in this subject.
IBM has basicly given to any serious takers the full specs for their reference ppc board.
Not yet, they haven't. Because of problems with the Northbridge, they've held off on releasing the all-important Gerber (layout) files. The schematics are there, though.
--Tom Geller
Co-founder, The OpenPPC Project
President, Pop Computers (to build motherboards based on open designs).
Tom Geller
They've got linux booting on it now, and the process is takin time, but once a real board hits the market, we'll probably see several ambitious pc board makers jump on board trying to differetiate them selves in this commodity market. Now, as this will clearly have lower volume than the x86 board market, we should expect relatively higher prices, but as people come to realize that powerpc without apples pricing is actually very price competitive, and the initial costs are recovered, the prices ought to come down a bit.
I've been looking forward to a ppc board market similar to the x86 board market for awhile. Fortunately the one-two punch of linux's cross platform compatability, and the fact that most of the apps that run on linux are open source means that having linux on ppc become more of an equal to intel and alpha linux is a realistic goal on the short term. That was the biggest problem with NT on non-intel platforms, sw companies had to invest resources in porting their x86 centric apps to non-intel, and then attempt to support them on very low volume platforms. With open source, the user community can ensure that the apps have cross platform compatibility and support, while the developers have the option of doing that work, developing new features, or even doing nothing. The code lives on regardless.
so, I'll get off my risc soapbox now, but I hope i've made the point that we can expect to see much broader support for linux on powerpc real soon now, and who knows, with the kind of performance you could get from altivec with intensive apps like encryption, packet filtering, compression, rendering, etc should make it easy to see that there are genuine advantages to working with alternative technologies. appliance wise, you would think that one of these security vendors would jump all over the opportunity to make a high performance security appliance that can do some serious vpn-ing at a relatively low cost, or even if you think about Be selling ultra low overhead (and cheap) rendering farms of dual G4s to graphics designers or digital animators or whatever they call themselves these days. That would be fscking cool! (never mind the mandatory references to beowulf clusters, or even just seeing natalie portman straddling one of those bad boys ;)
Red Hat buying LinuxPPC would be a very wise move, I think, especially considering the fact that the ppc linux reference release is based off of RedHat source packages. There would hardly be any work left to do to turn it into a real RedHat release. I'd be looking forward to more sane support for X. Right now there are 2 different types of X you can run. You can run Xpmac, which is older and tested, but I have no idea what sources it was originally based on. There's a more recent XFree86 port to PPC, but it's fairly flakey and lacking features that are typically needed on the Mac (like 3 button mouse emulation). I think I'd be very pleased to see a real PPC port of RedHat.
I think that if SuSe finally decided that they should port to PPC, Red Hat will soon be following. I don't know if they will port themselves, though. Maybe they'll just buy LinuxPPC. Seems like a logical move to me.
GNU/Linux. The Freshmaker.
It's been said many times here. Here we go again:
/.ers are going to admit to wanting to run Windows? ;-)
PPC systems are NOT significantly more costly than their Intel counterparts.
By the time you factor in the fancy case, motherboards with actual engineering (!) and the exotic (and in many ways superior) microprocessor, how exactly are you paying so much more for one of these machines? The iBook is the best example. The closest thing to it in terms of features and performance is a certain ThinkPad model, which costs several hundred US dollars *more*.
Of course, if you want to run Windows, you don't have much choice. But how many
You can run NetBSD or Linux on a Mac. Some poster above felt native Linux didn't run much faster than emulated Linux... I want some of whatever he's smoking. egcs produces the best-optimized code for the PPC architecture (as well as most others), and all of LinuxPPC is compiled with it (since origina-flavor gcc generates brain-damaged code for PPC). It's *really fast*. I know it's meaningless, but close to 500 Bogomips on my wimpy old upgraded-to-300 MHz-G3 box, with teeny 512K cache and slow 45 MHz bus.
I bought this machine in 1995, and have only spent a couple hundred bucks on upgrades to stay fairly current. Anyone playing Q3A on their 1995 PC? If so, let's hear from you.