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.”Terra Soft solutions being an open-source company, focussed on selling Linux, the YDL PowerStation’s primary focus is being open, in more than one sense of the word. “Not even when ‘you-know-who’ offered a PowerPC workstation did the community enjoy such a well supported powerhouse. From firmware to graphics cards to OS, the PowerStation is open.” What they mean by this is that not only are the operating system and the firmware open source, but the machine’s components are all easily accessible. And the icing on the open source theme’s cake is the fact that the machine comes with an XGI Volari XP10 videocard – which has open source drivers. TSS hopes to serve several markets with the YDL PowerStation, mostly related to development.
The machine has some pretty hefty specifications:
- Quad-core (2 dual-core CPUs) 2.5GHz IBM 970MP processors with AltiVec SIMD acceleration for native 32- and 64-bit processing; 1MB L2 cache per core
- 8 DIMM slots for DDR2 667MHz for up to 32GB RAM; ECC supported
- Adaptec Obsidian 8 port SAS RAID Controller with support for RAID 0/1/10 base and RAID 5 with optional mirror fast write cach daughter card; single 70GB SAS drive by default, up to 4 drives total 1 enhanced IDE for media devices
- 2 Broadcom HT2000/BCM5780 Gigabit, full duplex ethernet ports
The base model, which has all the above specifications and 2GB or RAM, will sell for a price of USD 1895. Shipping starts late June.
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
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=