Apple's PowerMac G5 has been out of sale for nearly two years now, which some find a sad thing. As we all know, the desktop PowerPC market is more or less dead by now, which means getting your hands on a PowerPC workstation is either difficult, or very expensive. Terra Soft Solutions, the company behind Yellow Dog Linux, is about to launch its YDL PowerStation, the unofficial successor to the PowerMac G5. "Not just a simple replacement, but a well designed, perfectly packaged, readily upgradable, and far, far, more open source friendly system. The YDL PowerStation is four cores of unleashed Power in a solid, affordable package."
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Member since:2008-06-12
IBM does not have it's own Linux. It certifies Red Hat (RHEL) and Novell (SLES) will work on it's systems. So I'm guessing they would work just fine if they use standard hardware that is well supported (as it sounds like they are). The only thing might be that although it is open source, SLES and RHEL may not include those firmware/drivers yet. If you are talking about AIX, I highly doubt it. I don't think IBM sells AIX unless you get it with their hardware or upgrade.
Also, It appears to me that it is a customized IBM system. The case looks very similar to a ThinkCentre/ThinkStation which IBM sold off to Lenovo. The front grill is very telling. http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPortal/en...
I wouldn't be suprised if it wasn't an IBM designed machine that TerraSoft rebrands.
Actually, it looks identical to IBM's now discontinued Intellistation Pro Series:
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://cdn.overstock.com/ima...
Identical case, just has a PowerPC chip inside instead of intel.
Member since:2006-09-30
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Member since:2006-01-03
Member since:
2005-07-10
I love the idea of this. Yellow Dog on an optimized machine would be very nice.
I wonder if you could get it to run IBM's Linux as well?
SLOF firmware:
http://www.openbios.org/SLOF
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/pa-slof/
Power Systems: (IBM 970MP is not exactly POWER5)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER5
IBM Linux:
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/software/linux/index.html
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/browse/linux/?c=serversintro&n=Linux2...
Edited 2008-06-12 22:49 UTC