OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story/23071/GNU_Linux_Distros_Silently_Drop_PowerPC Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2013, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Fri, 24 May 2013 15:37:17 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif OSNews.com http://www.osnews.com Not too surprising http://www.osnews.com/thread?415642 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415642 These are primarily desktop-oriented systems and PowerPC is darn near close to dead in the desktop space. It was never huge on the desktop and once Apple, the only company actively pushing PPC for desktop use, dropped PPC it was pretty much inevitable. The boards and CPUs are expensive as compared with X86 or ARM, and there's no real benefit to PPC anymore the way there used to be.
That being said, if there's still enough call for these systems on PPC the community will, I'm sure, make it happen. That's part of the real power of free software, you're not only bound to what the official project leaders want for it if you have the knowledge to do what you want with it. Sun, 28 Mar 2010 21:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (darknexus) Comments Notice how many are picking up ARM http://www.osnews.com/thread?415643 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415643 Part of the problem with PPC is how many people have working PPC systems. PS3 was the major home PPC system that people had and it was not great.

Really the drop of PPC is bad news for the PPC chip. Sun, 28 Mar 2010 21:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (oiaohm) Comments Fedora and PPC http://www.osnews.com/thread?415644 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415644 I noted that in the Fedora 13 Alpha announcement I submitted here but that was never published and my repeated inquiries to the editors were never answered.

The current situation is that Fedora is planning to support PPC as a secondary architecture along with ARM and others but the infrastructure requires some changes and the work there is still ongoing.

If you are interested, refer to

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/secondary/2009-September/0... Sun, 28 Mar 2010 21:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Rahul) Comments Not silently http://www.osnews.com/thread?415645 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415645 Nobody cares, so you don't see a lot of noise around it. Sun, 28 Mar 2010 22:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (diegocg) Comments RHEL and SLES http://www.osnews.com/thread?415646 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415646 I wonder how the two parent distribution of Fedora and OpenSUSE will support PPC. On the server side, PPC is still being used by more than 1%. RH dropped Itanium, but not PPC for RHEL6. RHEL6 should be based on F13, so, how is it going to work? They wont have any tester (mostly people using PS3 and G5 mac) to test packages. It will cost more to do the Q.A than it would have cost to compile Fedora PPC packages. Sun, 28 Mar 2010 22:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Elv13) Comments sad but inevitable http://www.osnews.com/thread?415647 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415647 PPC had promise as a mainstream arcitecture, but it didn't play out that way. dropping suport was bound to happen sooner or later, especialy with the new PS3 slim line removing suport for other OS's. Sun, 28 Mar 2010 22:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (poundsmack) Comments Linux != Ubuntu http://www.osnews.com/thread?415652 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415652 I apologise if this sounds petty and pedantic but the title of this article seems to imply something other than the reality.

Last time I checked the GNU/Linux ecosystem did not consist solely of OpenSuSE, Ubuntu & Fedora; as has already been said these are distros aimed at the average desktop user and the average desktop today just isn't powered by powerpc; sad? Maybe - true? Definitely.

Does this stop projects like YDL from going forward using GNU/Linux though? Does it stop Debian from supporting everything from my pimped out PPC A1200 to my nice new shiny sam440 flex? Not that I can see.

These days every news story I read about Linux seems to assume that all Linux distros exist only to challenge the supremacy of Windows et al in some kind of epic David & Goliath type struggle. Just because a few of the big boys are ditching PPC doesn't mean that GNU/Linux as a whole is. Sun, 28 Mar 2010 23:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Junius) Comments RE: Linux != Ubuntu http://www.osnews.com/thread?415653 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415653 Ubuntu, openSUSE, and Fedora (and Mandriva) do make up most of this landscape, whether you like it or not. Seeing as headline space is limited, this is a perfectly acceptable compromise. Sun, 28 Mar 2010 23:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom_Holwerda) Comments RE: RHEL and SLES http://www.osnews.com/thread?415654 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415654 OpenSuSE's decision clearly hurts Novell business. SLES for PPC is pretty common on System P hardware and without OpenSuSE, Novell has to test and support the platform by themselves. Not good. ;) Sun, 28 Mar 2010 23:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (sergio) Comments not shocking http://www.osnews.com/thread?415655 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415655 It's not really all that shocking for large corporate Linux distributors to drop support for an architecture that for all practical purposes had very little chance of generating revenue. I am certain that if a large PPC contract came in they would start supporting it again, but either way, it is open source, and that having been said, it is quite likely that a person (or group of people) will pick up the slack for the nitch PPC desktop market.

This is the beauty of Linux, no one company, government, or person controls it. Anybody can jump in and pick up the slack if the need is there. Sun, 28 Mar 2010 23:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (re_re) Comments RE: Linux != Ubuntu http://www.osnews.com/thread?415656 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415656 The title seems fine. It doesn't say that all GNU/Linux distros are dropping PPC support. When you don't spec it is an implied existential statement, so the fully explicit version would be "There Exist Some GNU/Linux Distros That (Will) Have Silently Drop(ped) PPC Support" (allowing for the tense ambiguity that comes from the desire for short headlines). Also, the author states that Ubuntu is an exception to the described trend since they dropped PPC support but not silently. Sun, 28 Mar 2010 23:10:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (clhodapp) Comments RE[2]: Linux != Ubuntu http://www.osnews.com/thread?415658 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415658 I was actually talking more about the general perception of Linux these days and how it isn't really an accurate portrayal if you look at GNU/Linux holistically. I wasn't criticising your editorial decisions; if anything the title was just a convenient embodiment of the idea I was trying to present.

Perhaps I should have been clearer? Sun, 28 Mar 2010 23:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Junius) Comments Debian http://www.osnews.com/thread?415659 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415659 I chose to install debian on my old Mac because it seemed to offer the best out of the box support for PPC architectures. I have to say that is has been a very pleasant experience. Sun, 28 Mar 2010 23:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (tchristney) Comments RE: RHEL and SLES http://www.osnews.com/thread?415661 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415661 Fedora has a build system for PPC and will continue to do builds and releases depending on how much of the community steps up to do it. IBM is part of that community for example and can participate just like any other volunteer.

RHEL has to do extensive QA in-house for RHEL regardless of Fedora and testing focused on enterprise features tend to be quite different from what the community tends to care about. They are essentially two different although there is some overlap. Sun, 28 Mar 2010 23:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Rahul) Comments RE[2]: Linux != Ubuntu http://www.osnews.com/thread?415664 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415664 To the contrary, if you don't say then most people assume "all", or at least "in general", and not "some". Think about the phrase: "I love babies!" The speaker certainly does *not* mean that (s)he loves only a few, but that given an arbitrary baby, (s)he loves it. Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (jack_perry) Comments RE: Debian http://www.osnews.com/thread?415665 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415665 Same here. The old ppc Mac Minis are dirt cheap, and make great servers, taking up virtually no space at all. Debian works great on these, and certainly isn't about to drop ppc support. Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Torrance) Comments RE[3]: Linux != Ubuntu http://www.osnews.com/thread?415666 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415666 I believe that this is true most of the time, but not in headlines. Example: "Unemployed Workers March on Capitol Hill". This does not mean that all unemployed workers marched, but rather means that some did. Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (clhodapp) Comments RE[4]: Linux != Ubuntu http://www.osnews.com/thread?415668 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415668 So how about interpreting "Unemployed Workers March on Capitol Hill, love babies"? :-) Mon, 29 Mar 2010 01:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (gehersh) Comments RE[5]: Linux != Ubuntu http://www.osnews.com/thread?415670 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415670 All that I can say is that that would make for a hilarious story. Mon, 29 Mar 2010 01:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (clhodapp) Comments YDL??? http://www.osnews.com/thread?415671 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415671 What about Yellow Dog Linux distro??
It's still around.. Mon, 29 Mar 2010 01:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (macrules) Comments RE[4]: Linux != Ubuntu http://www.osnews.com/thread?415672 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415672 Did I say "all people", "some people", or just "people"? ;-) Mon, 29 Mar 2010 02:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (jack_perry) Comments RE[2]: Debian http://www.osnews.com/thread?415680 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415680 Even when Debian "Officially" dropped support for M68k platforms, there is still a port of Etch for it, with some talks of updating it to Lenny..

http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-68k@lists.debian.org/msg14151.ht...

I wouldn't worry too much about it not supporting PPC at least for another few releases.

I'm a HUGE debian fan. Not so much for Ubuntu and Fedora, and esepecially openSuSE/SLES. Mon, 29 Mar 2010 03:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (leech) Comments Is this related to the latest PS3 firmware revision? http://www.osnews.com/thread?415681 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415681 Apparently, Sony in their infinite "wisdom" has decided to disable other the "other OSs" option in the upcoming firmware revision... for ALL the PS3 models, not just the new slim PS3s which did not have the ability to run linux from the get go. Mon, 29 Mar 2010 03:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (tylerdurden) Comments RE: Is this related to the latest PS3 firmware revision? http://www.osnews.com/thread?415683 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415683 I think it's got far more to do with Apple dropping the PowerPC architecture years ago. They were the major supplier of consumer PowerPC hardware, now that they're gone PPC is going to fade away, however slowly.

Of course, Linux is the only real hope of modern operating systems on those old Macs... Mon, 29 Mar 2010 04:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (DigitalAxis) Comments RE: Notice how many are picking up ARM http://www.osnews.com/thread?415684 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415684
Part of the problem with PPC is how many people have working PPC systems. PS3 was the major home PPC system that people had and it was not great.

Really the drop of PPC is bad news for the PPC chip.


Well the problem with the PS3 is that Sony never released the full specifications to allow full hardware acceleration; so other than creating a nice beowolf cluster, it was never suitable for anything other than a hobby system. Then again, this is Sony we're talking about who creates stupid bits of technology; the blutooth alternative that used more power, over a shorter distance etc. it was a bag of inferiority and yet Sony still tried to push it. Then there is BetaMax, their proprietary memory stick format, ATRAC3plus format was a weird proprietary format never fully enhanced, the minidisc format that could have gone places but kept proprietary. The fact that Linux on PS3 did not amount to much isn't a surprise to cynics like myself who could smell epic fail from a mile away. Mon, 29 Mar 2010 04:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (kaiwai) Comments Gentoo/PPC http://www.osnews.com/thread?415685 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415685 Gentoo still has a well maintained PPC ports, both 32- and 64-bit versions.
Incidentally, my first experience with Gentoo was on a PPC-based iBook G4... Mon, 29 Mar 2010 04:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (l33tmmx) Comments RE: Notice how many are picking up ARM http://www.osnews.com/thread?415687 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415687 Have this something to do with Sony removing "Other OS" support of the PS3? Coincidental and weird. Mon, 29 Mar 2010 05:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Doca) Comments who cares? http://www.osnews.com/thread?415693 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415693 What the heck is a PowerPC? Oh wait its that dead platform that no one runs and that since Apple quit making them, a system that no one uses anymore. Is this really news worthy? I bet you can count how many PowerPC users there are on one hand. Mon, 29 Mar 2010 06:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (ChrisA) Comments ppc users care http://www.osnews.com/thread?415695 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415695 i'm not on ppc, but the users care, and windows users say the same about linux: who cares? who uses linux? why would anyone develop program x for linux? See, the same thing. Mon, 29 Mar 2010 07:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (d.marcu) Comments RE: Not too surprising http://www.osnews.com/thread?415697 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415697 PPC support was never good in any distro, I'm surprised they had it so long. There were PPC specific distros such as Yellow Dog Linux but they didnt support many ppc architecture out of the box.
For some old risc hardware you had to apply like 30 patch for 2.4 kernel and do additional hacking just to boot the box and even after that not all hardware in it was supported.
Anyways whether there is ppc distro or not you can always compile manually most of the gnu softwares for it or make your own distro. Mon, 29 Mar 2010 08:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (xaeropower) Comments RE: who cares? http://www.osnews.com/thread?415721 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415721 There are millions of PPC in use. In game consoles. So the reports of PPC death are greatly exaggerated.Edited 2010-03-29 11:21 UTC Mon, 29 Mar 2010 11:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (viton) Comments RE[2]: Notice how many are picking up ARM http://www.osnews.com/thread?415766 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415766 Not really, Linux/PS3 was dead already.
It has more to with PPC dying as a consumer architecture. Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (makc) Comments PPC ship is sinking, abandon ship ;-p http://www.osnews.com/thread?415776 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415776 Everyone already knew that the PPC titanic have hit the ice berg ;-p They are slow in abandon ship ;-p Mon, 29 Mar 2010 15:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (funny_irony) Comments I will be sad to see it go http://www.osnews.com/thread?415784 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415784 I still have one PPC box that gets a lot of use. I am not really active in the community as the box just works and I am not a developer. Mon, 29 Mar 2010 15:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (JPisini) Comments RE[2]: Not too surprising http://www.osnews.com/thread?415851 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415851 Many distros that ran PPC, but slowly, OOtB, like Ubuntu, would also have random packages that wouldn't work. I'm sure this is why things like MorphOS can stay around.

Until 99% of our software is written with managed languages, which do not allow you to do low-level work on memory addressing, or rely on a specific endianness, or other such things, I doubt the situation will change much, because there is too much required testing, and not enough people and time to do it for every package.Edited 2010-03-29 19:17 UTC Mon, 29 Mar 2010 19:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (cerbie) Comments At least it's not straight up dead across the board. http://www.osnews.com/thread?415911 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415911 It's too bad, but understandable.

I've had Fedora running great on my G4 MDD dual 800.
Debian it is then I guess. Tue, 30 Mar 2010 02:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (factotum218) Comments Ubuntu still has a PowerPC port http://www.osnews.com/thread?415946 http://www.osnews.com/thread?415946 Ubuntu still has a PowerPC port, it's just not official, only community maintained.
See http://ports.ubuntu.com and http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/9.10/release/ Edited 2010-03-30 09:59 UTC Tue, 30 Mar 2010 09:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (azrael29a) Comments PPC http://www.osnews.com/thread?416004 http://www.osnews.com/thread?416004 Yep. It's all but dead and Apple's pricing scheme didn't help all that much, although I did pick up several when you were still able to strip down Apples to almost barebones back in the day and get them at a reasonable price, i.e. drop that $500 hdd(c. $50 retail), $400 DRAM(c. $100 retail), etc.

So, in the end I still have a powermac G4 functional, an ibook, and an older pre-G series PPC desktop but I hardly use them for anything other than fileserving(G4) and the other two are rarely used at all now. (The older PPC was really for BeOS, and I got a MUCH nicer notebook that is more powerful than Apple's uberly overpriced macbook pro at something approaching 1/3 the total cost. Still like OSX but it's just not worth the tax, so I run x86-64 and Windows Vista ATM(games).)

Pretty much the only PPC systems left are embedded and I suspect that they'll be displaced by ARM based as ARMs will undoubtedly be cheaper given that they're already used in tons of embedded applications in consumer electronics while PPC is mostly restricted to industrial embedded applications excepting the PS3 which, to me, is an embedded PPC in a consumer device given that it's primary purpose is game playing, and secondarily movie playback and NOT general purpose computer use. (i.e. economies of scale)

I think that the only non-linux thing left using is Amiga OS and that other one that's sort of Amiga like but I forgot the name if they're both still kicking. (Haven't checked in years as compatible hw was somewhat pricey for what it was.)

So, we have, primarily, an embedded use processor in non-interactive environs whose support is being dropped by, primarily, what are server and desktop distros... Ubuntu officially dropped PPC years ago IIRC but I still think that they may have an unofficial build but I'm not sure if anyone bothers any longer, and as of a year ago Debian still had PPC builds(running on the iBook). Tue, 30 Mar 2010 16:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (cutterjohn) Comments RE: who cares? http://www.osnews.com/thread?416152 http://www.osnews.com/thread?416152 yeah, the irony is that you could run out of fingers easily while counting ppc users ;)

there is at least one ppc cpu in each ps3 and there are at least two of them in your xbox...

ppc is a beautiful piece of work and has beautiful history going far back

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~cis501/papers/cocke-RISC.pdf
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-powerppl/

hard to explain to fans of vhs ;) Wed, 31 Mar 2010 07:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (mojmir) Comments Right move http://www.osnews.com/thread?416276 http://www.osnews.com/thread?416276 I think that there is some confusion about Linux on PPC. The majority of systems using LinuxPPC are IBM System P and System i. Linux runs on the same hardware as AIX and Linux on Power has been pushed for a while. SLES and RHEL will not drop support for PPC. However, many of the above posters are correct that Linux for PPC does not make sense for a desktop distro like Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSuse. Those were intended for Macs which are very different than System P.

You do not typically hear about System P outside of AIX communities, but there is a very large install base in the fortune 500 space.

Linux on Macs = dead
Linux on System P = very much alive and well. Wed, 31 Mar 2010 20:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (bigredradio) Comments Some distros work better than other... http://www.osnews.com/thread?416588 http://www.osnews.com/thread?416588 i'm using with great fun a really smart distro: CRUX PPC.
It works fine and it seems to be supported. Fri, 02 Apr 2010 11:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (ppc.addon) Comments