Hi, Rick Thomas wrote:
I missed that message! I love PPC and I am still very sad it is getting, along with MIPS; a second-level platform with x86 and ARM now having the dominance.Hi All! Did anything ever come of this? What can we do to make it happen? now that the holidays are over and we each have a little more free time… Rick
I use PPC on two iBooks one with MacOS with Debian, on two iBooks, to check that all thw GNUstep software I am involved with works on that wonderful platform. I veryfy compilation natively and then on Debian+GNUstep. There are, however, lots of difficulties! People code less and less for big-endian platforms and for non-x86 as you write lots of stuff breaks.
X currently for me is in bad shape: the driver is crashing with cairo (I hope the patch gets into debian soon) and I have skewed colors. I can survive by exporting X and testing stuff this way, but it is again a proof of this "uphill battle".
a lot of work goes beyond debian, it goes in fixes that would benefit also BSD and others, since they are fixes in the userland!
I'm not using them currently, but I would have available an older 9600 running NetBSD, which always had SCSI problems, and 9500 which had a G4 card which I never got running full speed and I don't remember which OS it was running. I could dust them off :)
GNUstep stuff is a good candiate, since it is quite designed to be corss-platform and most developers, not just me, are receptive about platform compatibility. However Debian is our worst-packaged distribution... so well, not brightnews.
Riccardo