Sitting at a 7400 G4 as I type this, I can say that there remains some
interest. The biggest area would be in revitalizing old machines that
were otherwise disposed of as excess. Schools trying to wring a small
amount of worth out of older machines would also benefit.
Today's world is one where the x86 architecture is not absolutely
dominant. We're already seeing in the smartphone market the near
dominance of ARM architecture in devices. As those devices are becoming
essentially small portable computers first with telephone capability a
welded-on after-thought, the potential install base is becoming broader.
Strangely enough, Android is capable of running on any Power
Architecture architecture based handsets although I am not aware of any
out there right now.
Will there be a "mass market" in a few years with a single architecture
dominating? I don't know. Right now, the signs for the future are
uncertain. Keeping a PPC legacy intact at least provides good practice
for any potential world where no single architecture dominates.
Stephen Michael Kellat, MSLS
Sheffield Township, Ohio
skellat@fastmail.net
On Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:53:51 +0100, "Klaas."
Op 25-nov-09 schreef Larry Stotler:
Just got this answer from a bugzilla posting(https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=557580) from Michael Loeffler about why there wasn't a PPC version of 11.2:
"we (Novell/SUSE employees) won't provide a ppc distribution anymore. The effort for such a code stream is not justified by 0.3% out of all installations (see Distribution of architecture at http://en.opensuse.org/Statistics). Nevertheless we will support anyone who'd like to take over the task to build an openSUSE ppc distribution."
So, what's the interest in trying to keep the PowerPC port alive? With such a small user base, I agree it doesn't make sense for them to continue to do it(although I was under the impression that the POWER port of SLEx was based on openSUSE so I'm not sure what the status of that is going to be either).
I have several viable Powermacs that can run openSUSE. Peter Czanik uses it on a Pegasos PPC machine.
So, what's the interest? I'm not sure how much help I can be other than testing but I'd like to find out who else is using or wanting to use openSUSE on PPC.
Thank you for your effort.
As I am looking for a road forward in view of the fact that Apple dropped their PPC machines from support I selected openSuse.
There is a G4 Mini - running openSuse 10.3 and regularly updated. Not used every day but still very well on this hardwar. There is a G5 Dual 1.8 waiting to be useful again, and it has a 11.1 installation but not good. The desktop keeps reloading.
As for going to 11.2, all the iso's I downloaded wouldn't boot. I'll wait and try the next factory distro as soon as available. In the meantime I am unclear about the factory process. Is it just names like that because it is unclear what the status of the code is? Or some other reason?
By the way, I have used YDL but they don't mention PPC in their latest announcements I think.
greetings, Klaas Punt
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