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The End of an Era for the Pegasos PPC

  Submitted by kickasso Morphos 32 Comments

On BBRV’s blog: “The PegasosPPC will be on sale this week for $399. Neither the board nor an upgrade card will be produced again by Genesi or bplan. It is the end of an era for us. It has been a great experience.“

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Eugenia Loli

Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.

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32 Comments

  1. 2006-11-06 3:02 am
    tmack

    Meh.

  2. 2006-11-06 3:35 am
    AdamR01

    No wonder they had problems, its a bunch of kids!!

    • 2006-11-06 7:37 pm
      Kroc Silver Supporter

      …who got a hardware product to the market. I’m impressed regardless of outcome. Were you doing that when you were a kid?

      • 2006-11-06 10:36 pm
        AdamR01

        No I did not, but then again most buisiness people probably wouldn’t take a gamble like that.

  3. 2006-11-06 3:44 am
    mbpark

    Genesi is working on other projects involving newer Freescale processors. I’m glad that they’re moving onward to those. There’s much newer technologies out there such as SATA and PCI Express which can deliver much better performance.

    Unlike many other vendors in the market formerly served by Amiga/Commodore, they delivered a working product, supported it, and did not require proprietary/expensive as heck upgrades (I remember GVP RAM in my A1200 costing me an arm and a leg) for RAM or expansion cards.

    They also have incredible Debian and Ubuntu support, both of which I have run on my PegII. I guess that’s what happens when Sven Luther (who personally helped me troubleshoot some issues) works for you.

    Yes, Bill Buck and I do speak on a semi-regular basis. What happened in the past will stay there. There will be new machines out from them, and hopefully they’ll be as painless to set up under Ubuntu ;) .

    • 2006-11-06 5:23 am
      Janizary

      Sure, they may make more hardware, and hopefully they won’t f–k over Dale Rahn with it http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-misc&m=108028112117093&w=2 .

      • 2006-11-06 5:59 am
        ronaldst

        You do realize that there is a follow up to that story, eh? And bringing that up is useless at this time.

        • 2006-11-06 6:53 am
          Janizary

          I think the history of the company should be viewed repeatedly when people talk of it, it has a history of cheating people out of money for the work they’ve done. Hardly the kind of company I’d support in any of their ventures.

          • 2006-11-06 7:52 am
            blastwave

            I have been dealing with Genesi for nearly two years. The OpenSolaris project created an opportunity to port Solaris to a whole new architecture and we needed a hardware vendor that would help us at every step. We knew it would be a long path to follow and we would need every technical schematic. We would need multiple systems. We would need support with no real possibility of return on investment for a very very long time.

            Genesi stepped up to the plate and had provided free systems to people working on the PowerPC project. Genesi shipped systems all over the world at great expense and never made a complaint. It has been well over a year since I had my Genesi ODW and no one at Genesi ever asked for it back or for payment. Quite the contrary. When Blastwave was hitting hard times and searching for a corporate sponsor to help out Genesi stepped forwards and tossed in money. They never asked for anything and never even asked for a signature or a single piece of paper.

            I really don’t know what the history is of these past problems. I can tell you that I have dealt with the Genesi people for a while now and I publicly will stand by them and will say that they support free and open development in the open source world regardless of if its OpenSolaris or Linux. Regardless of the extensive costs. They have been open, honest, honourable and supportive.

            Dennis Clarke

            Director Blastwave.org

            — Please note :

            This is a verbatim repeat of :

            http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=13698&comment_id=96439

            I will repeat that position once more in order to be clear. Nothing has changed with one exception; Bill Buck and his staff at Genesi have truely poured their hearts into the OpenSolaris project over the past two years. They worked closely with Sun in order to achieve the first Solaris kernel on PPC in a decade. Genesi has stayed the course regardless of the fact that there has been _zero_ financial gain for them. Genesi has been a true friend of the OpenSolaris world as well as a world of Solaris users. The well loved Genesi ODW will not be used anymore as we look toward future technologies.

            Dennis Clarke

            Director Blastwave.org

            6 Nov 2006

            ———- final note :

            Screenshots of the new GNOME 2.16.1 on Solaris may be seen at :

            http://art.gnome.org/screenshots/gnome216

            The background artwork was done entirely on a Genesi ODW PowerPC based workstation running Fedora Core and my own build of PovRay. The build of GNOME was done by Ken Mays at Blastwave. Genesi has been a firm supporter of the Blastwave project.

            Who could ask for a better supporter of open source software and open software projects.

            Dennis

          • 2006-11-06 7:54 am
            gary

            ”it has a history of cheating people out of money for the work they’ve done.”

            To the best of my knowledge, Genesi went through a time when expected funding didn’t materialize, and money wasn’t there for employees and contractors to one degree or another. This timeframe includes the infamous episodes of the OpenBSD port and the end of the MorphOS support. If you know about Genesi “cheating people” before that time period or since, please give the details, as I believe your generalization about Genesi’s “history” is groundless.

            I don’t think Genesi’s past should be whitewashed, but I also don’t think it’s fair to make broad overstatements without facts. In my experience with them (some contracted web work and related support), they have been fair and there was no cheating. And this seems to be the general experience, certainly in more recent, less rocky times. If you have information to the contrary, please be specific.

        • 2006-11-06 8:08 am
          ronaldst

          But in the case you presented it wasn’t that scenario being played out, right?

      • 2006-11-06 7:43 am
        Rasmus

        http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=6499&limit=no#216868

        As they say, there is a ‘rest of the story’.

        The Pegasos has served me well since 2003 and its still running strong. I got mine here:

        http://vendors.gentoo.org/index.cgi?page=1&comGroup=1

        Genesi has done well by Gentoo.

        Rasmus

      • 2006-11-06 7:48 pm
        ironfist

        Genesi have sponsored me and Pegasos User Group, Sweden

        several times. They have sponsored with trips to conventions,

        and PUGS to arrange the PUSH alternative computer party.

        Genesi is a very supportive company.

  4. 2006-11-06 5:43 am
    re_re

    i have followed genesi for the last few years and they have always seemed to put out a nice os, but they never seemed to grasp the marketing thing.

    i think they definitly would have a shot at survival if they would offer their os for less (way less) money.

    If their os was 79.99 USD i think they would have a definite chance at survival, but at 400 bucks…., i would be supprised if they survive.

    the bottom line is this, no matter how great their os is, they don’t have the software to back it up, and most people are much more concerned with what software they can use then what os they use it on. If they can o nly get it for morophos, then they may buy it, but i think that 99% of the time superior software is available for mac and pc.

    • 2006-11-06 6:12 am
      gary

      “i think they definitly would have a shot at survival if they would offer their os for less (way less) money.”

      Genesi’s survival has nothing to do with MorphOS (which I guess is what you mean by “their os”), and this has been true for at least the last couple of years since they began to focus on Linux and other open source platforms.

      Also for the last few years Genesi has had no control over the price of and hardware availablity for MorphOS. MorphOS, which runs on Pegasos machines, is the project of the MorphOS Team, which is independent and makes its own decisions about what hardware to port it to and whether or not to charge.

      Genesi’s business plan has been more about the hardware and firmware than any particular OS (see http://www.Power.org ).

  5. 2006-11-06 5:55 am
    A30Guy

    Any chance Morphos might be open-sourced, or at least sold independently of the motherboard? It has always interested me, but not enough to buy a new single-purpose PC just for that.

  7. 2006-11-06 11:33 am
    -ujb-

    No chance for open source.

    But MorphOS is not sold with the Pegasos anyway, it is provided by the MorphOS team. Currently versions are for free. When the system will be more matured this will most likely change.

    Currently MorphOS is provided for PowerUp accelerator boards for Commodore Amiga and the Pegasos I & II. It runs on the Efika and some rumours (!) whistle something about a release for some old Macs.

    The coming 8641 based Pegasos will be a promising target, too.

  8. 2006-11-06 1:00 pm
    frood

    I know that certainly for me, the attraction of one of these boards was that OSX could be installed via MacOnLinux, with the benefit of getting to play with MorphOS at the same time. Apple’s move to Intel killed this incentive.

    I actually tried to buy one of these from the UK supplier but they said they were out of stock and I they weren’t expecting a shipment for a few months (this was a few years ago). Never heard anything back.

  9. 2006-11-06 1:34 pm
    Alleister

    …is that it took so long for the project to die.

    • 2006-11-07 12:36 am
      gary

      ” The only thing that surprieses me…is that it took so long for the project to die.”

      For the project to die? Do you actually understand what the situation is? I guess five years is maybe longer than the Pegasos series was expected to run. But Efika and other hardware are available now or coming, so I’m not sure what you think is dying.

      — Gary

      • 2006-11-07 1:56 pm
        Ronald Vos

        In all fairness, the blog entry isn’t very clear. Summary should’ve linked directly to the announcement, and secondly to the blog for the reminisce pictures, which give the wrong idea.

  10. 2006-11-06 1:41 pm
    Acill

    I have had the Pegasos since nearly the start of it and all i can say is well done!!! Genesi has been great to me and Bill Buck has gone way out of his way to make the Pegasos what it is today. I have never met anyone like him. I hope in the future MorphOS and the team get back onbetter terms with him and Genesi. I would love to see it continue on the great hardwar eI know is in the works and is soon to come.

  11. 2006-11-06 5:56 pm
    Seth Quarrier

    The PegasoPPC is sold out on the Genesi site. The Efika also looks like it is now for sale. I am very tempted to get one. I think that it would make for a great home server.

  12. 2006-11-06 9:45 pm
    madcrow

    Companies phase out old motherboards for new models all the time. Last I checked, there was a bunch of cool new hobby system design boards based on G4 and G5-level PPC chips. ready to come out. I assume phasing out the old G3 and Apple-surplus G4 boards is just preperation for a sweet treat.

  13. 2006-11-07 2:12 pm
    jonas.kirilla

    http://www.powerdeveloper.org/8641d.php

    http://www.powerdeveloper.org/tetrapower.php

    A dual Freescale or a quad IBM. Take your pick. Take both!

    What’s not to like? ;)