Terrasoft Solution has published the pdfs of the last issue of the Linux User & Developer magazine in which you can find interviews with Terrasoft’s Kai Staats and Genesi’s Raquel Velasco and Bill Buck. In it they speak about what has been done with the Open Desktop Workstation and of course about future plans.
I remember reading about her years ago during the Escom and later Viscorp days, and she doesn’t look like the kind of person I would trust. According to the OpenBSD developers Genesi is not a company I’d spend my cash on, although I’d love to have a cheap PPC-based system to run NetBSD on.
http://www.openbsd.com/pegasos.html
“Can you trust Raquel Velasco?”
– Yes you can.
They could’ve put them into one PDF! If they had I might have bothered to read them.
page3:
Why has Yellow Dog succeeded where others- including major players in the Linux world such as SuSE and Mandrake- have failed
SuSE just started with with ppc support in the OpenSuSE project,and allready have failed,or is it the potential marketshare?
SuSE just started with with ppc support in the OpenSuSE project,and allready have failed,or is it the potential marketshare?
SUSE used to have PPC support before version 7.2. It was dropped…probably because they failed to sell it.
Also, just a minor nitpick
, it is SUSE, not SuSE. Novell changed it when they bought out SUSE.
yeah latest PPC SuSE (and not SUSE because it was long before Novell:) was 7.3 … and it was loong ago… and by the same time there also was an alpha box… latest was 7.1…
Despite above it’s a sharp serie of pdf’s with a healthy look at Linux.
SuSE first ventured into the PPC/Mac world a few years ago and then pulled out. The OpenSuSE project is a new thing.
Honestly,i didn’t know,that changes things.
Linux is linux, regardless of whether it runs on a PowerPC, x86 or whatever.
What’s the point of the open desktop workstation ? Is it any better or cheaper than commodity x86 hardware ?
YDL is derived from Fedora Core, so why not just go straight to the source? I run Fedora Core 4 on my iMac. I tried the latest YDL, but I didn’t care for the changes they made compared to Fedora Core.
@JLF65
I read an article in the past that suggests that YDL provide a lot of effort in producing FC PPC edition.
I don’t think they sit around and whinge when is FC5, etc is going to be ready.
Just think of YellowDog Linux the same way as redhats product. It is a commercial offering, whereas Fedora is the community project.
Darn. Honey wants that new carpet downstairs, so my ODW savings account is growing only very slowly this month…
> What’s the point of the open desktop workstation ? Is
> it any better or cheaper than commodity x86 hardware ?
Folks who know about computer hardware architecture (not me) will enthusiastically tell you about how PPC is better, more efficient, and easier to code assembly for than x86, among other qualities.
Personally, I generally measure desktop computer performance as the ratio of computation you get out over the amount of power you have to pump in. Using this metric, a hunch tells me that the ODW mops the floor with most other PC’s out there (though is probably comparable to some mini-ITX boxes).
> YDL is derived from Fedora Core, so why not just go
> straight to the source?
Possibly b/c the Terrasoft folks are hardcore PPC geeks who are in business to make it “just work” on PPC, whereas Fedora is more of community-oriented project with PPC support not really being central to the project.
I haven’t looked into whether or not YDL accepts community contributions though for their distro. If you really want a community-driven distro rather than YDL, you could always just install debian on these puppies.
More here:
http://penguinppc.org/
Has the FSF weighed-in on the true openness of the ODW? I’m just curious to hear if they (or RMS) gives it the thumbs-up.
I’m also waiting to hear if future revisions will be coming with these in ’em:
http://wiki.duskglow.com/index.php/Open-Graphics
http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics
“Folks who know about computer hardware architecture (not me) will enthusiastically tell you about how PPC is better, more efficient, and easier to code assembly for than x86, among other qualities.”
I agree that the PPC is a neat architecture, but it hardly make any perceptible difference for the end-user. And most people don’t care about assembly programming.
“Personally, I generally measure desktop computer performance as the ratio of computation you get out over the amount of power you have to pump in. Using this metric, a hunch tells me that the ODW mops the floor with most other PC’s out there (though is probably comparable to some mini-ITX boxes).”
Yeah, probably. But my personnal metric measure performance as the ratio of computation you get out over the amount of money you have to spend to buy the hardware, and I doubt the ODW fare very well by that metric.
(doh, put my login in subject :p)
>But my personnal metric measure performance as the ratio of computation you
>get out over the amount of money you have to spend to buy the hardware
If you are developer you only pay 30USD over three years to get one of those things (and additional goodies):
http://www.pegasosppc.com/freeworkstation.php
I would be very careful about signing any contracts with Genesi. This really isn’t meant to be flamebait, although I’m painfully aware that this post will probably have that as a side-effect. Seriously, there is way too much publicly available evidence of several incididents where Genesi has miserably failed to honor their part of agreements they have made with other companies as well as specific individuals. One would think that this would be common knowledge by now but evidently, it’s not.
Just take a close look at http://www.morphos.net and then ask yourself again if it would really be so wise to sign a three year contract with god-knows-what legal obligations on your part besides the monthly cost. This is not the first time they portray themselves as a generous company with great business plans and promises for the future, and then completely crush the trust they’ve managed to earn by not honoring the promises and agreements they have made, displaying a serious lack of professionalism when the conflict arises and as can also be verified on the morphos.net website, prefer to use their money on their lawyers rather than pay what they owe. I remember a few years back when certain Genesi representatives found a certain Amiga community website and for no appearant reason donated a quite generous sum of money to the webmaster. This made quite an impression on him and when Genesi offered him a job, the possibility of Genesi ever having problems with paying a salary was the last thing on his mind. Unfortunately, this individual is now on that list of individuals on http://www.morphos.net.
My personal recommendation would be that if you really want an “Open Desktop Workstation”, atleast don’t sign anything.
// Sammy Nordström
:-‘)