Fedora PPC is now in test stage, a Fedora Core 3 test was released last week. Here few impressions and screenshots on this test release.
Fedora PPC is now in test stage, a Fedora Core 3 test was released last week. Here few impressions and screenshots on this test release.
FC3 looks okay… but I have an old iMac waiting to get the linux treatment. Which PPC distro is the best?
<<Which PPC distro is the best?>>
Ubuntu
<<Which PPC distro is the best?>>
I have gotten Unbuntu and Gentoo to work on my ibook G3. I liked Gentoo better, but it took me about 3-days of hassle to get things working. Unbuntu took 1-hour and is mostly set up the way I like things. If I had to do set things up again I would choose Unbuntu.
While I would agree with the Ubuntu vote, it might be a bit early to write off Fedora. I personally like apt, dpkg, and Debian in general. Ubuntu has also committed to PPC from the start while Fedora is kinda testing the water right now with this preview. Maybe FC4 will have good PPC support, but right now Ubuntu supports PPC and has a commitment to it and has a non-beta release for it.
I like Fedora. It is getting better and better with each release. It’s usability and menu’s have gotten so much cleaner. At the moment, it is a very good contender for being the last distribution you will ever need to try. But three things keep it from being the king of all distributions and keep me looking around for a better distro.
1) Documentation – Need a lot of general use documentation and nerdy/how-to-do cool stuff documentation. Right now this is a big empty hole.
2) Repository – Fedora is very popular. It would be far more popular if they had a nice sizable repository. They don’t need to make it as big as Debian or Gentoo, but there definately are holes in their current selection. They are working on this and finally some of that work is bearing fruit.
3) Boot time – Boot time is slow. Although, it takes about the same amount of time to boot Fedora as it takes to load Windows XP fully, the competition (Debian and FreeBSD) load about 70% faster.
Once that gets fixed, Fedora/Redhat will be the ultimate distribution.
1) Documentation – Need a lot of general use documentation and nerdy/how-to-do cool stuff documentation. Right now this is a big empty hole. 1) Documentation – Need a lot of general use documentation and nerdy/how-to-do cool stuff documentation. Right now this is a big empty hole.
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if you are interest join the fedora docs list and propose some docs and ideas
2) Repository – Fedora is very popular. It would be far more popular if they had a nice sizable repository. They don’t need to make it as big as Debian or Gentoo, but there definately are holes in their current selection. They are working on this and finally some of that work is bearing fruit.
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should be fixed in fc4 because cvs and pre extras has been announced
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3) Boot time – Boot time is slow
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bootchart.sf.net – read the details
“3) Boot time – Boot time is slow
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bootchart.sf.net – read the details”
Yeah, I haven’t timed my system after running YUM, but it was ridiculous before that. After seeing how long it took to start my system, I decided to just leave the room and come back after 5 minutes so I never got to see the speed improvements after running YUM. Also, my desktop doesn’t have a floppy, so I need to see if modprobe is adding more time to the boot process. Anyways, 45 seconds is still a long time and I’m still wondering why some distributions can get their boot time to 20s. I think as a general rule, distributions should target 30 s as a ceiling for boot-up. And I don’t care if there are other OS/distributions that take longer.
Anyways, 45 seconds is still a long time and I’m still wondering why some distributions can get their boot time to 20s
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20s is a unreasonable demand IMHO. ubuntu and fedora developers have been working on using bootchart to bring their distro up and running in 30s. that seems more likely..
On a related note, the previously announced (http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9175) opening of the Fedora CVS repository has now happened: http://lwn.net/Articles/116366/
This has already been reported in osnews
Why are people so obsessed with boot times? My old (5 years) PC with Debian on it takes about 60 seconds to boot up, ditto with my iBook G4 running Mac OS 10.3.7
I mean, fair play to the various devs out there who are trying to improve their distros’ boot times but I don’t really see a problem in a desktop/laptop OS taking a minute to boot up.
If someone finds it to be that much of a problem, it must mean that they are powering it up and down too much which they shouldn’t do anyway. (By too much, I mean more than once a day)
Which PPC distro is the best?
I have to add my vote to Ubuntu. It runs pretty well on my G3 iMac (Revision A). I didn’t have the courage to try OSX after all my Mac friends said not to bother.
I did have a little trouble with the configuration of Ubuntu (512×334 resolution!?!?), but their forums have a lot of good tips and hints. I think the url is ubuntuforums.org…
Why are people so obsessed with boot times? My old (5 years) PC with Debian on it takes about 60 seconds to boot up, ditto with my iBook G4 running Mac OS 10.3.7
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for many people a faster booting system gives the impression of more efficiency. its probably not the only factor that counts but an initial good impression can go a long way
> (By too much, I mean more than once a day)
Please, don’t post unqualified arguments. What’s this about “obsessed”?
Think a little bit before posting answers and you will recognize, why boot times could matter and why booting more than once a day is no “obsession”.
The reason? Think about the many notebooks in universities and as you have for example binary drivers for graphic cards (because of 3D suport) installed, you can’t just use the standby- or resume-function. It does not work => boot times sometimes matters (but naturally not for every case)
I have gentoo installed on my Athlon 64 box and I can boot into X in 20 seconds. My XP 2500 box running gentoo can boot into X within 30 seconds. I think Redhat will never get thoes times because their OS isn’t optomized for each cpu sub-arch (athlon-xp, p4, x86_64, etc.) like you can do with gentoo.
I think Redhat will never get thoes times because their OS isn’t optomized for each cpu sub-arch (athlon-xp, p4, x86_64, etc.) like you can do with gentoo.
Nah, it’s probably because Gentoo doesn’t turn on many services by default and you get to choose what get’s compiled into the system.
Yeah…CPU optimisation is so important to bootup speeds. Yeesh.
Come on adam, a recompiled grub w/ -O3 -march=pentium4 -mcpu=i686 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -msse2 -mfpmath=sse
makes it hella fast 😉
With those optimizations, should take 1, 2 nano second off grub…….
:shrug:
-O3 -march=pentium4 -mcpu=i686 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -msse2 -mfpmath=sse
Why -mcpu=i686? Why would you tune the instructions for an i686 processor but use the Pentium4 instruction set?
This might actually make grub slower
<<My XP 2500 box running gentoo can boot into X within 30 seconds.>>
You know, on my AMD 2200+, a default install of Mandrake 10 will boot into X in under 35secs.
those are old settings, I don’t use gentoo anymore, last time I used it was with gcc-3.4 and it used mtune=pentium4 and got ride of a bunch of the other stuff, anyway I was being a wise arse…..
some of the gentoo zealots really need to come out of the closet and quit thinking the “optimizations” are making there box upteen times faster. It doesn’t, and I think most of the people here have used gentoo and already know that so it would be fun if they could just not talk about how you can optimize grub to boot your system faster……….
Exactly. The Fedora bootchart thing has showed invariably that slow boot times *anywhere* it’s run (it’s been used across distros, because it’s a really neat tool) are mostly due to the initialisation being entirely blocked by something; while it’s blocked everything is IDLE, the CPU isn’t being used at all. CPU optimisation is hardly going to change this. (For instance, on Fedora a few Fedora-specific services were fingered for causing long wait periods during boot; on Mandrake, problems with udev cause the system to sit still for several seconds waiting for devices to be created at more than one point, and network startup can also completely hold the system up for several seconds. These problems and the fixes for them have absolutely nothing to do with compiler optimisations.)
People aren’t obsessed with boot time because it gives them the impression that it is an optimized system. People are obsessed with boot times because they don’t like to wait, doing nothing, watching their computer boot up. For people like me, who don’t like paying the electric company money, we turn the computer on and off every day. When I get back from work, I probably use it about 30 mins to 1 hour a day surfing the web and checking my email. Assuming a one minute boot up, that would mean I spend around 2-4% of my time watching the computer boot up. That is simply unacceptable.
A Celeron 333 with BeOS could boot into the GUI under 20s (14s if memory serves), and BeOS’s GUI is the equivalent of Gnome or KDE (with autologin enabled), not X!
So, let’s not brag too much about Linux (slow IMHO) boot time.
Not to make fun ov anyone, but why bother putting Linux on a Mac anyway? MacOSX is based off of BSD and is already a great OS, so why take it off?
Just because you can? It’s about freedom I guess, I just don’t get it. Linux on PC is good because you don’t have to many alternatives that are good (i.e Windows), but OSX is pretty solid and reliable.
Mate are you for real??? You obviously don’t know much when it comes to Gentoo. Those who installed Gentoo and thought it didn’t run any faster obviously didn’t install it properly. If they had actually took the time to read the documentation when installing it they would have noticed how important it is to edit the make.conf file so that the correct architecture is used as well as stipulated some USE flags. It’s also very important to realise the different stages used for installing Gentoo. Doing an easy install (Stage 3) with precompiled binaries is obviously not going to be as good as a Stage 1 install where you can configure and tweak things to your liking. sheeesh…another clueless idiot!
Yes I’m a Gentoo user and proud of it and glad I use it. I’ll NEVER go back to RedHat or Fedora Core!
bah!
Though this is not a real hot button for me, I too have wondered why it takes so long to boot some of these modern systems. I remember using BeOS (probably the best OS I have used to date. even better considering its competition at the time!) and it would boot in about 15 seconds (maybe 20) and this was back in 1999 and 2000.
Oh well…I have to go and watch some movies on my BetaMax (better technology doesn’t always catch on
)
the bootchart is pretty cool little tool.
I installed it on a test desktop at work:
Dell Gx110
P3@733
1GB ram (pc133 if i remember correctly)
I went back re-enabled all the services that are default:
1:11 time
I took out all the stuff I don’t use again:
1:04 time
Ok, it takes 1 minute to boot, who cares? This is a computer and an OS people. Do you really expect it to just “BAM” and it’s on/up/ready to go? There sort of complex pieces of equipment.
Take yourself for example, when you drag your butt out of bed, are you on/up/ready to go in a matter of seconds? (coherent anyway) 😉
BeOS is faster, ok go use it and all the wonderful apps that are avaible.
Besides the only box that i shutdown on a daily basis is my laptop, go figure
To the people that talk about not wanting to pay the power company’s more money, guess what, it cost more to keep doing the initial fire up/power jolt than it does to leave it running idle/standby so shutdown arguement to save pennys doesn’t really fly.
Final conclusion & thoughts: 1 minute, who cares?
I’ve used gentoo since 1.1 – a few months back. I’ve used it on Sun Hardware/p2 300 – dual xeon 2.8 – amd duron – amd64 3200 so yes smart guy, i’m very aware of how gentoo works and how the optimizations work. I pretty much installed it 100’s of times on all types of hardware because at one point i thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. But, after using it for so long I started to see were it wasn’t all that great. If it’s great for you, cool, but you don’t know me and you have no idea what i know or do. thx
If your talking about the cflags ^ there then I will explain this one time for you real smart cats out there.
When I used gcc-3.4 with my dual xeon build it was WAY WAY BEFORE 3.4 was even stable and you had to use mcpu=i686 because the build system worked off of 3.3 first, then after that stage 1 you can move to mtune=pentium4 and rebuild stage 1 again (bad code, bug call it what you will). not a big time loss considering it was dual xeon’s after all, btw this was on reiser4 too, so i know what i am doing and you really should think a little harder before you speak.
Since your so uber ellite annonymous gentoo zealot you should do your self a little test if you have some hd space. Install fc3 on there and compare operating speeds. If you don’t have space, i assume that your ellite enough to create some, and you seem so smart that you should be able to boot 2 OS’s too.
Have a fun day!
And now back to the news about Fedora on the PPC…….
I’ve used gentoo since 1.1 – a few months back. I’ve used it on Sun Hardware/p2 300 – dual xeon 2.8 – amd duron – amd64 3200 so yes smart guy, i’m very aware of how gentoo works and how the optimizations work.
Really?… Ok if you say so lol…
I pretty much installed it 100’s of times on all types of hardware because at one point i thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
There’s your problem then…. Nothing is as good as sliced bread. Perhaps you expected too much out of it? Try a little butter on it next time.
If it’s great for you, cool, but you don’t know me and you have no idea what i know or do.
Yeah its cool for me cause I’m 00b3r 3l337!!…. As for what you do, who cares. If you were such an expert (tech support officer?) then you wouldn’t be saying the complete garbage your saying in your posts about Gentoo. It seems to me that it all seemed a little too hard for you so you bailed out, started bitching about Gentoo and reverted to name calling Gentoo users because you just couldn’t cope with it. I’m quite amazed you say you installed it 100’s of times and then opted to go with Fedora Core. Now I know your talking out of your ass.
If your talking about the cflags ^ there then I will explain this one time for you real smart cats out there
No… i was talking about the “USE-flags”. Are you sure you have installed Gentoo 100’s of times??… The purpose and let me stress this to you because you are such an expert right?… The USE-flags are used to optimize or tweak the compilation of applications. In other words if you want to run just Gnome you could use the following USE=”gtk gnome -qt -kde”. What this does is build just a system tweaked for Gnome without adding all the other garbage code for KDE and QT. Fedora Core does not do this. If you tried it you would see and notice the difference it makes when running Gnome. If you have some spare disk space install Gentoo again and tweak the system using USE-flags and then tell me your benchmark results. Go read up on the USE-flags as I can’t stress enough how important it is to use them.
Since your so uber ellite annonymous gentoo zealot you should do your self a little test if you have some hd space. Install fc3 on there and compare operating speeds. If you don’t have space, i assume that your ellite enough to create some, and you seem so smart that you should be able to boot 2 OS’s too.
Oh please…. I’m 00b3r 3l337 remember!. I have probably been doing this while you were still in nappies. Mate I have installed numerous OS’s over the years (yes I’m probably classed a senior to you now). I have had Linux, Windows, QNX, BEOS, OS2 all at the same time so please don’t patronize me.
Have a fun day!
Want to join me in a game of Doom3 so you can whoop my ass? :/
Seya!
“The USE-flags are used to optimize or tweak the compilation of applications. In other words if you want to run just Gnome you could use the following USE=”gtk gnome -qt -kde”. What this does is build just a system tweaked for Gnome without adding all the other garbage code for KDE and QT.”
Ooh look, it’s a ricer. Exercise: if I run the GNOME environment on a machine which has both GNOME and KDE installed on it, how does ‘all the garbage code for qt and kde’ (whatever that may be) affect the performance of the system in any way? This exercise will be graded.
More to the point, how does any of it affect the BOOT process in any way? Is there any usage of USE flags on a Gentoo system which would produce an effect on boot times which you could not also produce on a binary-based distribution? This exercise will get you bonus marks.
LOL
your funny guy/girl/whatever. you really don’t have a clue, thinks for dropping bye.
/me moved back to rh/fedora because he works with Red Hat servers in the “Enterprise” and “fedora” desktops and found out he gets a hella lot more work done on his uber 3ll3t fedora box’n, instead of compiling software for 2 nanosecod speed increase in the binary while a 3 nanosecond in delay time to launch his uber optimized program that took 10min-2 hours longer to install.
Anyway, sounds like you have benn using Gentoo, well for a short time (maybe longer, but it doesn’t sound like it) anyway, I hale you uber geek gentoo elite and i bow down to thee in….oh wait, nah….
I’m still not sure why the company i work for uses RH/AIX/HP-UX/Solaris instead of uber ellite gentoo, mabye you can help me figure that one out? eh eh eh, whats that?
btw, I don’t use kde and I used your fancy way of keeping kde/qt out, but damn the grub speed was still the same 8)
optimize/sloptimize, whatever plays your fiddle mate.
Yes, if i had a sexy 12-17″ powerbook or a dual G5 I would happily put Linux on it and more than likly put Fedora on it. Why would I but apple hardware and put Linux on it? Why would I buy x86 hardware in the store (laptop) that comes with windows or buy sparc hardware that comes with Solaris and put Linux on it? Um, well cause I’ve used the rest and to “me” the best is Linux so if you don’t mind, I bought it I can do whatever I want with it and I can even install Linux on it, thx…..
@AdamW & CyberCrackles
Oh dear please….. Do yourself a favour and readup on the “USE-flags” before you make such idiotic statements. The USE-flags CAN be used to increase performance for both the system and applications. Now I am totally convinced both you and CyberCrackle are complete morons and ignorant of the facts.
Cybercrackle: The reason your company probably uses those Operating Systems is because of the support they provide? Lets also not forget that RedHat has been around a lot longer than Gentoo and does offer good support (not talking about Fedora here). Besides, servers don’t require to be optimized to the shithouse because its not necessary unless you want it for SGI purposes. The desktop however is another story. Most people running X with a heavy desktop environment/window manager will notice the improvements with a system thats optimized for their architecture. If I’m not mistaken isn’t that what Fedora Core is doing? Last I read the FC3 was optimized for Pentium4 processors right??? Too bad about everyone else!….
Now to both you moron’s….. I couldn’t give two hoots about Grub!!!… I also couldn’t care less about the boot time. I’m talking about over all performance when in X… Perhaps I should have been a little more clearer on that. There ya go you both score uber eleet score points on that one…woahhh!…
GO FEDORA CORE!!! LMAO!!
Now let me go eat my rice cause I love asian food
Whoops. If you’d been paying attention you would have noticed that I did not make a statement, I asked a question. Or rather, two questions. It seems you wish to answer neither. I mentioned you’d be graded…sadly, you get a FAIL.
good convo…..