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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-powerpc-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20131121141607.ga20...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
