Re: Creating a PowerPC task force?
On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 03:07:39AM -0200, Rogério Brito wrote:
> Dear people,
>
> Motivated by:
>
> * the results of the last call to porters
> * the fact that PowerPC (at least) used to be an architecture where Debian
> shined
> * the lack of external support (which means that we should help ourselves)
> * the documentation that is too spread
> * the need of architecture-specific tools (pbbuttonsd? mouseemu?
> gtkpbbutons? anything that needs to be revived? yahoot? grub2?)
grub2 upstream at least is working quite well on powerpc. I have been
using it on power6 and power7 systems for 3 or 4 years now.
I would assume the *button* things are powermac related given I hadn't
heard of them before.
> I thought: perhaps are people out there that may be interested in shaping up
> the powerpc port of Debian?
>
> In fact, since:
>
> * Ubuntu doesn't offer an official PowerPC release anymore.
> * Apple has long given up updating the operating system for PowerPC users.
> * Major projects like Chromium/v8/nodejs are not available for PowerPC.
> * Firefox for PowerPC is essentially dead as far as Mozilla is concerned,
> with only a very bright enthusiast working on building it with JavaScript
> acceleration (http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/),
>
> we are essentially orphans of the architecture. Again, would anybody else be
> interested in addressing the current problems that PowerPC seems to have?
>
> It would be super nice to work on having the installs as good as possible
> (meaning: "working with as little fiddling as possible after a fresh
> install"), integrating intelligence about snd-aoa, snd-powermac etc. in
> debian-installer, making the 3D thing work as well as feasible,
> automatically suggesting programs (alas, even firmware) that are of use for
> a powerpc user?
So on which systems are you thinking? Old powermacs or modern IBM
pSeries?
> What about this idea?
>
> Perhaps we can already grab/compile the resources that others have already
> kept (say, the Gentoo pages, which are very good, the Ubuntu PowerPC FAQ,
> which is another very good resource), an old document that I, a long time
> ago, started writing at https://github.com/rbrito/powerpc-tutorial etc.
>
> Of course, having both the document for those people that want to know how
> things are done and having the code that just works is the golden goal...
>
> Please, let me know if you are interested in joining efforts. I will only
> commit efforts if I see other people contributing, as I have my hands full
> already.
I think other than the installer needing a bit of work to know the
correct partition setup to use on IBM powerpc systems (as far as I recall
wheezy still doesn't quite do the right thing, although it has been a
while since I did a new install), and making it install grub2 properly
on systems where that is a better choice, it actually works quite well
out of the box these days.A
Certainly for a while yaboot was hopelessly out of date which made the IBM
systems impossible to use it on, and grub2 wasn't good enough for it yet.
I think yaboot is now new enough to work, and grub2 is working quite
well too.
I have no experience with the powermacs and other than the dual G5s,
they are just so hopelessly slow and outdated that I can't imagine really
bothering with them.
--
Len Sorensen
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