Re: future of debian-ppc
On Thu, Aug 24, 2006 at 09:49:50PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 24, 2006 at 09:55:11AM -0400, dtutty@porchlight.ca wrote:
> > Sven,
> > Should I even be considering a switch from comodity-x86 arch to RS/6000
> > when I personally am not a kernel hacker? I'm looking at the RS/6000
> > because of its inherent reliability as opposed to x86 reliability based
> > on cheap replacement when it breaks.
> > What is your wisdom on moving from x86 to RS/6000?
>
> Well, it depends on the RS/6000 you are considering, myself i have an interest
> in more recent IBM hardware, so that will mostly be supported in the near
> term.
>
> On the other hand, there is a good kernel (not debian) powerpc community which
> should care about those needs of yours, but the official d-i status is pretty
> much a mess, but more bug reports from people like you can only help. Bastian
> Blank also is making good work on powerpc kernels at the moment, and there is
> a new effort going on for the oldworld machines.
>
Personally, to keep it straight, I differentiate between the more recent
IBM as pSeries and the older as RS/6000. I can't afford a pSeries but I
can afford a 7026-H50 (dual 604e 332, expandable to 4-way), 256 MB
expandable to 3GB, three PCI busses over 9 slots.
As far as d-i, I've never been able to get d-i x86 to boot on anything
I've got (I guess its too old, the most recent being a Pentium II) and
end up using 3.0 boot-floppies then either CD, floppies, or the
basedebs.gz on a Zip, followed by an update.
Do you know how the performance of dual 604e compares with Pentium 4 from
a user perspective? I haven't found benchmark comparisions. I'm
looking for comparisions from real-world usage like blasted java and
flash in mozilla (on a 486 its click-have-dinner-click-again) and
browsing through pdf files. Everything else I do is fine to tolerable
on a 486. With a faster computer, I hope to do things like use a USB
vidio capture dongle to transfer VHS tapes to DVD, use a scanner, store
and retouch digital camera images, etc.
In general, what is your wisdom of using an older (though still PCI)
RS/6000 for usual desktop stuff? (please ignore the physical box size
issue).
Thanks,
Doug.
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