Re: Is a Raptor Blackbird (or other Power machine) a good general-purpose desktop?

[Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola@libero.it>]

Hi,

Lionel Élie Mamane wrote:
> Thanks for the link, interesting and I didn't know about this one
> indeed. Beyond "not available this year", I see the one-but least FAQ
> https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/faq/
> says that it won't run a "modern distro" in little-endian mode, as
> "although it does support LE, modern distros require some
> functionality that are not available to this CPU".
> 
> And Debian's only 64 bit Power port seems to be... little endian? Big
> endian is not even listed on https://www.debian.org/ports/ as being in
> progress, it is not there at all.


the laptop should run in BigEndian mode. We already run Debian on the
NXP development board.
Debian powerpc tuns on both my PowerBook G4 in 32bit as on my iMac G5
... so while it is unstable, they don't know that page lists them as
debian discontinued.
Most software is available,but YMMV, especially on the browser side.
Browsers are an amass of layers and libraries and for certains there is
high resistance on portability support (e.g. SKIA).

Sadly, programmers are lazy and Big Endian support is fading away, as
newer generations don't have the culture of the golden age of computing,
accustomed to Intel and ARM only.
Usually nothing is unfixable, however certain things are pretty complicated.

Riccardo