First impressions on Debian/HPPA
I've installed the December 2001 snapshot ISO and apt-gotten updates from
the local Finnish Debian/Woodyy mirror a few weeks ago and have been
playing with the distro since then.
To everyone involved in materializing this port (HP technical staff,
Debian crowd, early adopters, jne.), thank you; it's a great start! ;-)
Sound and frame buffer support is already excellent, X fairly stable, and
core Gnome environment usable [1], even though the application base is
still limitted (e.g. no GUI Web browser yet - neither Galeon nor Mozilla,
even less Opera).
To this effect, I've tried porting the Ximian kit, starting with Evolution
(is anyone else working on porting Evo to HPPA?). Some errors regarding
macros that should be avoided in coding appear, thus the package doesn't
build in its current form. [2]
Still, this workstation is currently doing great as a colour xterm (with
XMMS entertaining my ears in the background) and as a fileserver, for now.
I'm anxiously waiting for more.
Keep up the good work!
***
1. ...though horrendously slow on this 712/60 but then again, the same can
be said of the corresponding Gnome i386 packages on my dual-P90. To some
extent, I'm begining to question the relevance of anything GUI on Linux,
whenever running anything less than the latest hardware. It definitely
contradicts early statements from a few years back that "Windows is fat,
slow and buggy, while Linux is lean and mean", a good example being Word97
on my pieced-together 486sx junk being faster than AbiWord on my Dual-P90.
2. Then again, I cannot get Ximian's Red Carpet to build on Woody/i386
either, which opens a lot of questions regarding the portability of Ximian
sources overall.
--
Martin-Éric Racine, Helsinki, Finland.
http://www.pp.fishpool.fi/~q-funk/
+358 41 474 0289
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