Re: future of debian-ppc
On Thu, Aug 24, 2006 at 04:17:07PM -0400, dtutty@porchlight.ca wrote:
> 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
It will be abysmally slow, but usable, it depends what you want to do with it.
it is something like almost 10 years old technology after all.
it will beat the pants off x86 hardware from the same era though.
> looking for comparisions from real-world usage like blasted java and
> flash in mozilla (on a 486 its click-have-dinner-click-again) and
You will have to rely on free flash implementations, which are not as
compatible as the official ones, altough IBM has a rather good java
implementation for those.
> browsing through pdf files. Everything else I do is fine to tolerable
Well, pdf files should be fine, not over fast, but fine.
> 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.
You are able to do that on a 486 ?
Seriously, you would be better off getting an used powermac of some sort, with
1ghz-ish cpu, or one of the genesi pegasos machines.
> 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).
I hope the above will give some replies.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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